A woman who sells television antennas in the Zócalo walks slowly through a mostly empty plaza as the sun begins to rise and thinks of her sister who lives in Ohio now. Her sister who was beautiful before she had children. Teresa never had children herself. She and Reuben tried for years. But nobody called her beautiful to begin with. Why all this again now? The light, something about the changing light. As if a sheet were slowly being lifted off the crust of the earth. She crosses the plaza and thinks of a sleeping face, some lost morning. Her sister’s name is Rosella, a name Rosella always said she hated though it went so well with her beauty. She’s not lost, she’s in a place called Dayton.
The light slants across the plaza, slightly pinkish now. The four-sided arch looms. It’s really an unfinished building they call an arch. They started to build a new parliament here, but the land was too marshy, and so they had to stop. Didn’t they take off your shoes before they started to build? Maybe politicians who build parliaments never take off their shoes. But aren’t all buildings, like people, unfinished? We build and we build and still we’re not done? I know where to find Rosella and still she’s gone? It’s a question for God, who looms above this arch as indifferent to sisters as he is to parliaments, as he seems to be about so many other things. When they were girls, Rosella once slammed her on the nose with the bottom of a teapot. Teresa forgave her sister the same afternoon. She forgives her again this morning. For the teapot. For not being beautiful anymore. For being so far away she might as well not exist. Rosella. From her eyes not from her mouth in the now noisier morning.