According to the report, they found the sheets of papers in his shirt pocket—folded and neatly filed. According to the report, he’d fought like a demon to keep those sheets of neatly folded papers. According to the report, he’d spit and clawed and cussed and kicked. At one-thirty in the morning. On the southeast end of downtown. In an alley. Behind ¡Viva Villa! a bar on San Antonio Street. A bar not far from the courthouse. Not far from the county jail. Which was where he was taken. Which was where he was booked. For being drunk and disorderly. For resisting arrest. For spitting and clawing and cussing and kicking. All this, according to the report.
Grace had learned to be suspicious of reports, just as she knew others were suspicious of her own conclusions—also written out in that peculiar genre they called reports. She had decided long ago that reports existed to create the illusion of order. That was what made them readable. That was also what made them fiction.
She was doing it again. Questioning herself. Deconstructing her profession. Always, she did that when a new and difficult case made its way to her desk. And there it was, another one of those cases. Right there. On her desk. Out of habit, she beat her chest with mea culpas. That’s how mass began, with mea culpas, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. Beat your chest, Por mi culpa. Embrace your limitations, Por mi culpa. Exorcise your paralysis. Por mi gran culpa. Take Communion, Amen, then go out to the world and do your job.
As she ran her hand over the sheets of paper, she tried to picture a young man trying to hold off four police officers with the sheer power of his rage. She ran the scene over in her head, the young man, drunk, sitting in an alley, reading his own writing in the dim light of the streets, and then suddenly, the lights of a police car shining on his face, the officers asking him questions What are you doing there? What are you doing? and him refusing to act like a deer about to be run down, refusing even to acknowledge their accusing presence What’s that you’re reading? and him folding the sheets of paper, slowly, carefully, and filing them back in the shirt pocket and them asking him again What’s that you have? and him saying finally The fucking Communist Manifesto, and the now-angry cops insisting to see what he’d been reading, as if the act of reading were some kind of goddamned felony—and anyway he was sitting in an alleyway, drunk, and that was reason enough, and hadn’t he defied them?
That man, that angry young man, he was lucky he hadn’t been killed. The possibility existed that he’d wanted exactly that—to be shot and killed and finally fall silent and at peace because his days brought him anything but calm and he was so fucking tired of trying to make sense of a life that made no sense at all.
She made a mental note to herself, then shook her head as she stared at the man’s handwriting. She didn’t approve of the way the police and the judge had so easily placed his confiscated writings in the file they forwarded to her. When they took you, you were theirs, your clothes, your wallet, your belt, your cigarettes, the few dollars you carried in your front pocket, your keys, all you had—which was nothing anyway—it was all theirs now. That’s what happened when they had you. And so the system had made her the inheritor of what had once belonged to someone else. The papers—his papers—now hers. An interesting progression. All legal and good, good for the young man who’d carried them, and good for the society that was protecting him, though it wasn’t at all clear how he had harmed anyone except the policemen who had tried to take him by force. But it was all to the good, sure, now she could help him. And these pieces of paper, they would help her to help him. Him who needed help. So there they were—his words written on the sheets of paper, the creases still there. She kept running her hands over them, sheet by sheet, trying to smooth them out, her ironing hands as useless as the roots of a dead tree. You could never uncrease a piece of paper once it had been folded. Not ever.
She shook her head. Not a good business, this thing of having another man’s writings in your hands. Not a good business at all. But like it or not, he was her client. So there was nothing left to do except to read the words that had not imagined her as an audience.
Love is a storm that twists and mangles us. If you love—if you really love—if you have that kind of heart—then you know.
(And if you don’t, there is no explaining.)
The storm comes from within.
There is nothing you can do to prepare.
Hardly the words of a criminal. Hardly the words of a lunatic, either. Except that lunatics often wrote well. They did. She’d seen it time and time again. Lunatics could write. They had that in common with pompous poets. On the second sheet of paper—though she had no idea if she were reading the pages in the correct order—she read and reread another passage on the same topic.
Remember this: Nothing is as simple as a storm. Ask anyone.
They will tell you—those who know about storms—to get out of its path. If you can. If you have time. They will tell you nothing can stop a storm. Save yourself. Run. But there is no running. Laugh at yourself for thinking of escape.
Remember this: Nothing can destroy a storm except itself. It must hurt and blow and wail till it dies. You will not be alive to clean up the debris. All the light will be gone.
She was almost envious—not simply because of his obvious discipline, but because of the physical fact of his writing. Clean, legible, delicate. She was not used to seeing that kind of beauty in her line of work. Damage—now that was a word she was used to. That’s what she was used to seeing. And she was used to describing that damage even if she did not believe that a damaged human being could be translated into words.
She looked at the handwriting again. This man, whoever he was, knew something about control, knew that control could kill, but also knew control could save a life. This man, he knew something about beauty.
On the third sheet of folded paper, he had continued writing on the same theme. But something had changed—not in the tone, but in the writing. Perhaps he had been drinking. Perhaps he had been tired. Perhaps he’d written the third page at a completely different time in a completely different place. The actual writing had begun to fall apart. He had stopped drawing one letter at a time. On the first two sheets of paper, the words seemed to matter as much as the message he was trying to convey. But, now, he let himself be drunk in the message. That kind of drunkenness had a different kind of beauty altogether.
I know a man and a woman. They had that kind of heart. A heart so pure it was nothing but storm. In the end, how could they have been anything else except misshapen and deformed and grotesque? Who would have guessed that they were beautiful? At least in the beginning. God, they were Beautiful. Their skin glowed in the light. I think their hearts glowed, too. Who would have guessed? But they were born with that kind of heart, so how could it have been otherwise?
I hated watching them as they loved their way through life—though no one called it that. Not even the people who should have known better. They misnamed it other things. And goddamnit, it was all so obvious. Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Why do people fucking do that? Why do they always overlook the obvious? All the fucking time!
No one knew them.
And even me who did know them. I—I hated being loved by them. But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t. It is useless to run from a storm. So I stayed. I know about storms as well as anyone.
So what am I going to do with this mangled fucking heart? It isn’t good for anything, not anymore. If my body was a computer screen, I would delete the file marked “heart.”
She couldn’t help but wonder what had taken him there, to that alley behind that bar. She often wondered about her clients. She cared more for some of her cases. She was like a bad mother who played favorites. She was going to care about this one—that much she knew already. She always knew from the start. Not that caring changed anything. She had learned that what mattered most was not how much she cared, but how much the client cared. Some of them had been worn down to nothing long before they reached her office.
She almost didn’t notice the phone was ringing. She always lost one of her other senses when her mind was engaged. Sometimes it was her sense of smell—but usually it was her hearing. She slowly reached for the phone. “Grace Delgado,” she whispered, her greeting dry and distant.
“Grace, you busy?” Mister. He’d had a deep voice since he was a boy. He never called, but when he did, he called her at her office. Never called at home anymore—as if their relationship were purely business.
“Mister?”
“How are you, Grace?”
“The same.”
“Are you with a client?”
“No.”
“I saw you last week. I honked. You seemed distracted.”
“I might have been.”
“You were walking out of Dr. Garza’s office. Is anything wrong?”
“No. Just a checkup.”
“You sure?”
“For someone who never calls, why the sudden interest in your mother’s health?”
“I’m trying to be civil, Grace.”
“You’re good at being civil.”
“But not so good at being a good son.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“What is it, Mister?”
“Why don’t we have a drink after work?”
She could almost see him biting his lip or pulling on his untamable hair. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“Yes.”
“You can tell me now.”
“I’d like to see you.”
Just then he sounded sincere. Like Sam. That was the thing about Mister—he was so much like his father. So why did she find it so difficult to love him? “Sounds serious.”
“It is.”
“Are you getting a divorce?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Grace, but Liz and I are doing just fine.” He took a breath.
She knew he wanted to scream.
“You always have to do this, don’t you, Grace? You always have to go for the throat.”
“I’m sorry. I apologize.” She clutched the receiver tightly. She took a deep breath and looked out into the blinding midmorning light. “Where would you like to meet?”
She’d managed to make him angry in less than two minutes. Always, it was about the same subject. His wife. The first time she’d met Liz, it had been clear that she was capable of doing a great deal of damage. She’d concluded that her attraction to her son was a cheap attempt at inviting some kind of goodness into her life—as if goodness were something you could get secondhand. She and Grace had taken an instant dislike to each other. Liz had looked at her and accused: “You’ll turn him against me, won’t you, Grace?”
“No. He’s not the kind of man who turns against the people he loves.”
“Does that mean he won’t turn against you either, Grace?”
“That’s exactly what that means.”
She’d been wrong, of course. Mister had turned against her. But that had begun long before Liz had entered the picture—so it wasn’t fair to blame her. Liz was just salt on the wound. She had understood nothing about the man she’d married. Nothing that mattered, anyway. Six months. Just six months. And she’d run off with another man. Mister had shown up at Grace’s door, drunk and sobbing. “How could she have done this? How, Grace? Look at me, Grace. Look at me.”
A few months later, he’d taken Liz back in.
“She just had the jitters, Grace. You know, she was scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Of being married, of being loved.”
“Oh, I see, so she goes off with another man.”
“Forgive her, Grace.”
“I can’t.”
“You mean, you won’t.”
“She wrecked your car. She totaled it. While she was with another man, Mister.”
“What’s a car compared to a fucking heart, Grace?”
She resented thinking about Liz, about Mister, about what was wrong with them. When she thought of them, they took over the room. She shoved them away, then turned back to the file she’d been reading. Other people’s problems had always been more interesting to her than her own. She noticed the name on the file. Andrés. Andrés Segovia. She smiled at the irony and half wondered what his parents had been thinking when they named him.
She reread what Andrés had written. She couldn’t help herself. Much as it bothered her to have these pages in her possession, these words said more about the author than the rest of the file, where he was referred to mostly by the word suspect. Files had too many rules and limitations. A police report regarding the arrest. The judge’s mandate to see a counselor, the terms and conditions. It was all there. A name, Andrés Segovia. An age, twenty-six. All these things were clear enough. But what about the face? The look in his eyes? The movement of his hands? The stubborn or quivering lips? Those things said more. They always did.
She put the file down.
Andrés Segovia. Andrés who’d been found on the streets, yelling and cursing and howling like an alley cat or a dog with rabies. He’d scratched and kicked and even tried to bite. Not like a person. Like an animal. That’s what the police report said. She half smiled. Policemen weren’t writers. But sometimes they tried. Like an animal. As if people weren’t animals.
She tried to put a face on him. His eyes would betray the chaos of his heart, the riots that were exploding everywhere inside him. His eyes would be so black that they would shine blue in the sun. That’s what she decided about Andrés. Andrés, who wrote words as if they were portraits. Andrés, who knew about storms.