Peixe was forty-one years old now. They had begun to see more of each other. A pair of reading glasses stayed around his neck at all times, tied with Yohan’s packaging twine. His hair was graying and he liked to joke about it.
He said, —Alfaiate, you’re looking at your future self, and he laughed as they walked the rows of his garden, watering the plants and the vegetables, tossing fertilizer onto the soil.
For his birthday one year Yohan bought him a new cane. Its handle had been carved in the shape of a boat. Pleased, Peixe twirled it and even attempted a dance in the garden. Then he pretended it was a sword and lunged at Yohan, who ducked and picked up a branch, and, like children, they dueled until they heard the priest shouting and they looked down at the trampled tomatoes.
As he aged, Peixe had become more youthful. One night Yohan was woken by a loud noise at his window. He saw Peixe standing in the street, leaning on his cane and throwing rocks at him.
Peixe was dressed in a suit. He had never seen him in a suit before. It was the color of the beach and the fashion was many years old. A flower was tucked into his lapel.
He called to Yohan to dress himself.
—And bring me a tie, he said, and Yohan did, appearing outside a few minutes later, tying it for him under a streetlamp.
Peixe slid his arm around Yohan’s and led him down the hill.
He was taken to a nightclub. The hostess seemed to know Peixe, showing them to a table that had been reserved. They ordered cocktails and faced a small stage where a jazz band performed with a singer who wore a slim blue dress and swayed her hips.
They stayed all night. A woman approached them and Peixe took her in his arms and settled her on his lap. Another woman appeared and took Yohan’s wrist and before he understood what was happening he was on the dance floor, the woman with her arms around him and smelling of perfume and her lips painted. She moved into him and he felt her hips against his as he held her waist and they circled the dimly lit floor.
He searched the woman’s eyes, trying to remember if they had met before.
She said, —You can’t dance, and he said, —No, and smiled, and she tilted her head back and laughed and her neck shone in the nightclub lights.
She told him to follow and took the lead.
They spent the evening and the early morning together, the girl teaching him how to dance, his jacket collecting a strand of her hair.
Her name was Ana. She had moved here from Brasília a few months before. Her mother was Spanish and her father Portuguese. She was twenty-seven years old and was a schoolteacher. It was the first time she had been to the nightclub as well. It was also the first time she had worn lipstick.
For a month there was a romance. She would wait until it was late in the night, when Yohan’s neighbors were already sleeping, and slip into the shop. He would take her upstairs and they would spend what remained of the night in that room with its low ceiling, Ana tilting her head as she went to him.
She drank coffee and liked to brush her hair. She wrapped spare fabrics over her body and he sometimes carried her up and down the house, visiting the rooms.
He made her a dress. He measured her body. He fell asleep with his ear against her belly button, listening to her breathing, feeling the energy of her. This chamber inside her skin.
They told no one of each other. And there were moments when he thought the months would go on like this. But they didn’t. He was never sure why. Just that whatever had contained them faded. They both understood this without saying so. It had been short-lived, a flare.
He used to see her on occasion in the market or on the street. They would wave and ask how the other was getting along. They would wish each other well and move on, she walking in one direction, he in another. And he would think fondly of those days with her.
Then came a day when they passed each other without stopping. Perhaps it had been unintentional. Perhaps they had been busy or had grown shy of each other. But the moment, as he shut his eyes and fell asleep, receded so that by morning he wasn’t sure whether it had ever happened.
• • •
One day, helping Peixe mop the floors of the church, he saw the advertisement for a job delivering newspapers. Waiting at the office, Yohan looked behind him at the boys and the girls waiting as well. They stuffed their hands in their pockets and made faces at him when the hiring man wasn’t looking.
He was given a shorter route than the children. He bought a bicycle. Every morning before dawn he delivered the newspapers. Some mornings when he was finished he climbed the hill and watched the horses. Other times he bicycled along the coastal road, stopping beside the land where the settlement once was and where the plantation house had been renovated and turned into a school, the field used for soccer tournaments that he and Peixe went to on the weekends.
They sat high in the bleachers, Peixe insisting, and they looked out over the field and followed the bright glow of uniforms.
Most of the people who had once lived in the settlement were gone. He knew that some of the fishermen had formed a village near a small bay but that was all. He did not know where the rest had gone, did not know whether they had stayed as a group or had scattered, moving across this country or even farther, across oceans.
He thought of the blind juggler who tossed hats and shoes. He thought of a boy with an imaginary spyglass, facing the coast. A girl’s lips brushing his ear as she spoke. The touch of a hand against his own.
He hoped that wherever they all were, their lives were how they wished it to be.
A goal was scored. Peixe stood, lifting his cane and shouting, and Yohan joined him.
In this way the days passed. Those days became years. Those years a life. In the evenings he climbed the old stairs into his room. Standing by the window, he pressed a cold washcloth against his neck. A fan spun. He listened to music coming from the nightclub. An airplane. The voice of the woman across the street.