That evening after supper, Paul heard the sound of a child talking in another part of the house. He opened the bedroom door cautiously, but another door closed quietly down a darkened corridor as if synchronized, and a few minutes later they both heard a woman’s voice pass the window, and a car start outside. “The mystery deepens,” said Paul as the car drove off.
The following afternoon they met Alicia. She was a shy, withdrawn little girl, subdued even when alone with Maria, to whom she was evidently devoted. She bore a striking resemblance to her mother except for her colouring. Where Esmeralda was pale, blonde and blue-eyed as a child, Alicia was dark, with brown eyes and jet-black hair. Inevitably, Paul asked Maria about the girl’s father. “Se fue,” she answered with a shrug; he had disappeared “como los otros” Just like the others. He wasn’t in the picture then, and there had apparently been other men in Esmeralda’s life. Maria, it seemed, had a cynical view of men. Her own children lived with her mother in an Andean village miles from the city. She made no mention of a husband. Paul was familiar with the limited opportunities and difficult lives of uneducated campesinos, the simple country people lured to the city by false promises of easy money and plentiful jobs, who lived in ramshackle shanties perched on and disfiguring the hills around the city, the quebradas or ravines between each hill filled with mounds of suppurating garbage. Many of them resorted to crime or prostitution to make ends meet. Maria no doubt was one of the luckier ones. Paul hesitated to ask more about her, but felt compelled to inquire after Esmeralda. He told her he had gone to school with her many years before. “Ya se,” she answered shortly. She knew. It was in Senora Beck’s school for extranjeros—foreigners—she confirmed, with a disapproving sniff, before she vanished into the kitchen. She was unlikely, then, to introduce her guests to Alicia’s mother.
It appeared that the little girl’s schooling had been haphazard. She had moved frequently, she said, from one apartment building to another, and once in Borbon, a notorious gang-infested slum, where she had been bullied, and her mother taunted. Esmeralda was a rubia, a pale-skinned blonde, undoubtedly the object of a mixture of barrio envy, awe, and resentment: all the billboards showed smiling blondes, rare in South America, living the “good life.” Alicia spoke no English, and her muttered replies, delivered with downcast eyes, hinted at shame when she spoke of Borbon. Paul asked no more out of fear of prying, but piqued by youthful curiosity, he determined to penetrate Esmeralda’s mystery that evening. He would, he thought, intercept her on the driveway as before. He would be discreet: there would be no need to allude to her present circumstances, but she was his age, and from a similar middle-class background: were these circumstances of her own free choice, or had they—horrible thought—been imposed on her by “some sort of personal crisis”? If she wanted to, she could confide in him. If not, so be it. They were adults now, not children. He had no wish to judge, only to know, but it seemed as if she had managed to anticipate his plan, for she did not appear, and Alicia stayed the night at her grandparents’ house.
