In the middle of the night, Ted still couldn’t sleep. He grabbed “The Doublemint Man” and, flipping through to the last few pages, he saw Spanish, which he had not seen in the pages before, and which he could not translate. It was written in a different hand than his father’s, more graceful, curling and feminine.
El anciano tenía la piel morena, de color marron oscuro y como la piel de cuero de tantos años en el sol. Ese era su color ahora. Esta fue la evolución. Ella tambien estaba de piel morena. Y casi siempre con arena blance entre los dedos de sus pies. A el no le importaba la arena en la cama. El todavia la amaba, la amaba aún más por sus arrugas porque ellas no podian derrotar a su necesidad por ella. O su amor. Su joven lujuria se habia convertido en amor y entonces su amor volvo a envejecer en lujuria. Era un círculo. Fue en milagro. Fue la alquimia de la carne. Solo lo atrapado del mar—wahoo, barracuda y mahi mahi, y comian lo que recogian de los arboles—papaya, platáno y coco. No olviden cerveza de la bodega. Caminaban. Nada mas que ellos mismos necesitaban. Estos era ellos. Eran
And below that, what he assumed to be the English translation in his father’s recognizable hand:
The Doublemint Man was tan, deep brown and leathery from years in the sun. This was his color now. This was evolution. She was brown too. And almost always had white sand between her toes. He didn’t mind sand in the bed. He still loved her, loved her more for her wrinkles because they could not defeat his need for her. Or his love. His young lust had turned to love and then his love had aged back into lust. It was a circle. It was a miracle. It was the alchemy of flesh. They ate only what they caught from the sea—wahoo, barracuda, and mahi mahi, and they ate what they picked from the trees—papaya, banana, and coconut. Don’t forget cerveza from the bodega. They did not run, they walked. They needed nothing but themselves. This was them: They were
It ended there. Ended right there in the middle. “They were.” They were what? They were happy? They were not long for this world? They were? It was a story without an ending, and without an ending, impossible to understand. Who was the hero? The villain? Trailing off like that was too real, too much like life. It unsettled Ted, who wanted answers. He wanted art. Ted riffled through the whole book again, just hoping for something to fall into place, for a tumbler to click and the safe to open. He was about to put the old book down when he noticed on one of the last pages a phone number and an address. He ripped that page out of the book and turned out the light.