The rain had made Leona’s hair enormous. She could feel it happening, the individual ringlets absorbing the moisture and expanding with a slow, vegetable determination, until the whole arrangement began to resemble the result of an unsuccessful perm, the kind administered by a woman with very long fingernails in one of the hair salons across from Leona’s hotel, of which there were four, or possibly five, on the same block. Since their first afternoon in Mexico City, she had taken to calling the neighborhood Haircut City, privately, suspecting that neither Julian nor Oscar would find it funny, or more humiliatingly, that they might find it very funny indeed.

 

What interested her about the salons was their proximity to one another. Surely, it would make more sense, economically speaking, to spread out rather than occupy a single stretch of sidewalk where a person in need of a haircut could stand in the middle and survey every option without moving his feet. She imagined the proprietors, four women of approximately the same age and disposition, each harboring a hatred of the others, each watching through her window as customers passed her by, each convinced that the other three were engaged in chicanery. Or perhaps they were friends. Perhaps they met on Sundays to drink coffee and discuss the heads they had encountered during the week, the peculiarities of certain skulls, the surprising amount of hair produced by people who appeared, from a distance, almost bald. Leona decided that there must be a theory explaining the arrangement, something about competition or urban planning or the natural tendency of certain businesses to gather together like frightened animals, but she knew she would never discover it. She had always been capable of arriving at the threshold of an idea but incapable of entering it and letting it enter her. This was one of the things she disliked about herself, although not intensely enough to overcome her laziness to do anything about it.

“Are you listening?” Julian asked. 

“Yes.”

“What did I say?”

“Something about your father.”

“I was talking about the Aztecs.”

“That’s what I meant.”

Oscar laughed, and Julian looked at her with the expression of someone who had been interrupted in the middle of a rather important confession, though he had been explaining, for the last ten minutes, a theory about human sacrifice that he had developed after reading half an article on the plane. 

They were walking along a street in the Centro Histórico, or what Oscar insisted was still the Centro Histórico, although by now they had passed several blocks of automobile repair shops and darkened storefronts and the occasional building that appeared to have been abandoned in the middle of its own construction. It was almost eleven. The rain had been falling for an hour, never heavily enough to justify seeking shelter but steadily enough to make the absence of an umbrella seem like a moral failure. Julian had taken off his glasses and was carrying them in his hand. Without them, he looked younger and vaguely unwell. 

“Anyway,” he said, “the point is that they didn’t think of death the way we do.”

“Who does?” Leona asked. 

“The Aztecs.”

“No, I mean, who thinks of death the way we do?”

Julian considered this.  “Us, presumably.” 

“Who is us?” Leona quipped back. 

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

They walked another half block in silence. 

At the corner, a man was selling cigarettes beneath a blue tarpaulin. He had arranged the individual cigarettes in neat rows on a cardboard box and was staring at them with an expression of deep concentration, as though waiting for one to do something. Leona felt an immediate affection for him, followed by embarrassment at the affection, which seemed to her presumptuous. She knew nothing about the man. For all she knew, he was a terrible person. Yet something about his patience, or perhaps the cigarettes, which looked unusually vulnerable in the rain, had moved her. 

“There’s a bar,” Oscar said. 

Across the street, between a pharmacy and a shop selling orthopedic shoes, a red sign illuminated a narrow doorway. It said BAR LA ESTRELLA, the letters painted in several generations of red. 

“Looks terrible,” Julian said. 

“Good,” said Oscar. 

They crossed the street. Inside, a television suspended above the bottles showed a football match with the sound turned off. There were six men at the counter, a woman sitting alone at a table near the bathroom, and a bartender with an exceptionally beautiful nose. Leona noticed the nose immediately and then tried not to notice it again, a task that became increasingly difficult as the bartender approached them. It was a long, narrow nose, almost aristocratic, though she understood that there was something ridiculous about assigning class characteristics to cartilage. 

“What are you having?” Oscar asked. 

“Beer, I think,” she said. 

“Which beer?” 

“Whichever one you think I’d like.”

“And if you don’t like it?”

“I’ll think less of you.”

Oscar ordered three beers without consulting Julian. They sat at a table beneath a framed photograph of two men shaking hands. Neither man was identified. The photograph had yellowed considerably, and one of the men, the one on the left, seemed to be laughing, though his expression might equally have been one of pain. For a while, nobody said anything. 

Then Julian said, “I think our professor is lying about having known Octavio Paz.” 

Oscar smiled. “Which part?” 

“All of it.” 

“He said they had dinner once,” Oscar said. 

“He said they were friends.” 

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” 

“He also said Paz was a terrible conversationalist,” Julian said. 

“Maybe he was.” Leona looked at the photograph above them. She wondered how long a person had to remain dead before the question of whether he had been a good conversationalist became irrelevant. Fifty years? A hundred? She could think of several people whose conversational abilities had been so poor that their deaths, although unfortunate, would probably have constituted an improvement in the general atmosphere of any room they entered. She was appalled by the thought, but only slightly. 

“I believe him,” she said.

“Why?” Julian asked. 

“Because it’s such a disappointing thing to lie about.” 

“That’s precisely why I don’t believe him. If you’re going to invent a friendship with Octavio Paz, you might as well make it a good one.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know how.”

“How to lie?”

“How to have a good friendship.” 

Oscar laughed, lending her remark a cleverness she hadn’t intended. Leona, who was not immune to such distinctions, found herself momentarily pleased. Then she remembered that Oscar laughed at nearly everything, and felt cheated. 

The bartender returned with three beers and a little dish of peanuts, which had the grayish appearance of objects recovered from an archaeological excavation. Julian picked one up and examined it. “Do you think these are complimentary?”

“They’re already here,” said Oscar.

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“Eat one and find out.”

Julian ate the peanut. Nothing happened. 

“Well,” he said, “there you go.” 

Leona had never understood this expression, which seemed to her to suggest the completion of some elaborate process when in fact nothing had been accomplished. There you go. Where? She imagined a person standing in the middle of a large, empty field, being congratulated for arriving there. She wondered whether language had always been so full of these small deceptions or whether people had gradually invented them to make the passage of time more tolerable. It was possible, she thought, that the entirety of ordinary conversation consisted of people assuring one another that something was happening. 

“Do you think he’s lonely? The professor?” Oscar asked. 

“Of course he’s lonely,” Julian replied. “He’s a professor.” 

“My father is a professor,” Leona said. 

“Exactly.”

She considered objecting, but there was something about Julian’s confidence that made objection seem both necessary and exhausting. Her father was indeed lonely, though she had never thought of his loneliness as a professional qualification. He was a small man who enjoyed correcting the pronunciation of foreign names and had once spent an entire dinner explaining to a guest that the word decimate did not mean what she thought it meant. Afterward, when Leona asked why he had done this, he said that he had only been trying to help. It occurred to her now that a great many unpleasant things were done in the name of help, perhaps more than were done in the name of cruelty, though she had no evidence for this. 

“I think he’s happy,” she said.

“Your father?”

“No, the professor.”

“Why?”

“Because he has so many memories.”

“Half of them are invented.”

“That might make them better.”

Oscar was turning his beer bottle slowly between his palms. His hands were long and thin, with nails bitten almost to the quick, and there was something about them that Leona disliked, though she couldn’t say what. She had noticed that people who bit their nails often seemed to take the habit as evidence of a complicated interior life. She herself had bitten her nails until she was 14, when she stopped out of vanity, and had not become noticeably less complicated as a result.

“My uncle knew a man,” Oscar said, “who spent 20 years telling everyone he’d been in prison.”

“For what?” Julian asked. 

“Political reasons.”

“Was he?”

“No. He’d worked in a furniture store. But he said he’d been imprisoned in the seventies, and eventually people started inviting him to speak at universities. He became quite famous in certain circles.”

“What happened?”

“He died.”

“That’s not much of an ending.”

“Most people die.”

“Yes, but did anyone find out?”

“After he died, his wife told everyone he’d been lying. Apparently she’d been asking him to stop for years. He’d tell her he was going to a conference about political prisoners, and she’d say, ‘You were selling wardrobes.’” 

Leona laughed. You were selling wardrobes. There was something beautiful about the specificity of the accusation.

“Why did she tell everyone?” she asked. 

“She was tired of it, I suppose.” 

“Maybe she wanted him to herself,” Julian said.

“What?”

“His real life. Maybe she didn’t want everyone else to have it.”

Oscar shrugged. “Maybe she just hated him.” 

This seemed to Leona the more plausible explanation, although she was touched by Julian’s interpretation, which she suspected he had offered for the purpose of being touching. He had a talent for producing tenderness that seemed spontaneous but was probably the result of internal calculation. Once, at a party, he had told her that she looked like a woman in a photograph his grandmother kept beside her bed. When Leona asked whether the woman was beautiful, he said he couldn’t remember. She had thought about this for three days. 

“Do you think he believed it?” she asked. 

“The prisoner?”

“Yes.” 

“After 20 years? Probably.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Why?”

“Because then he’d have lost the only person who knew what actually happened.”

“His wife knew.”

“That’s worse.”

They drank their beers. On the television, a footballer fell to the ground and rolled several times, and Leona wondered whether he had mistaken his profession. The bartender looked up briefly, shook his head, and returned to wiping the same glass he had been wiping since they arrived. She imagined him wiping glasses at seventeen, at thirty, at sixty, his face changing while the glass remained more or less the same. She felt sad for him, then irritated with herself for feeling sad. He might have an excellent life. He might go home to a beautiful wife who kissed him on the forehead. He might be the happiest man in Mexico City. 

“Another?” Oscar asked. 

“Yes,” she said. 

Julian had taken out his phone. He was looking at a photograph of himself taken earlier that afternoon, in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes. He wore a white shirt and stood with one hand in his pocket. Leona remembered taking it. He had asked her to take several, and afterward had studied them with an expression of almost scholarly dissatisfaction.

“Delete that,” she said. 

“Why?”

“Because I took it.” 

“That seems like a reason to keep it.”

“No, I mean because you look terrible.”

He smiled without looking up. “You’re cruel.” 

“I’m trying to help.” 

Oscar laughed again, though this time Leona had not intended to be funny. She was beginning to feel the beer in her face, that pleasant loosening around the eyes and cheeks, as though the muscles responsible for maintaining her ordinary expression had been granted a short leave of absence. What did she look like when she wasn’t trying? Probably stupid. Or merely tired. It seemed unfair that other people were permitted to see one’s face at moments when one had no access to it oneself.

At the counter, one of the men had begun speaking loudly to another, who was listening with extraordinary patience. Leona could make out only fragments of what he was saying: something about a brother, a bus, a sum of money that had been promised and never delivered. The listener nodded, either in agreement or resignation. 

“Do you ever think,” she said, “that we spend too much time together?” 

Neither boy answered immediately, then both at once. 

“Yes,” said Oscar. “No,” said Julian.

They looked at one another. 

“Interesting,” she said. She had not meant to ask the question. Or rather, she had not meant to ask it then. For several days it had been on her tongue, but not there, not beneath the photograph of the two unidentified men with a bowl of ancient peanuts between them and the smell of damp wool rising from their clothes. She had imagined asking it under more serious circumstances, while walking beside a river, although she knew of no river they were likely to walk beside. There was something humiliating about discovering that the important conversations of one’s life could occur in places that had made no preparations to receive them. 

Oscar looked at her. “Are you bored of us?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s usually what you say.”

She felt a small, sharp irritation. It was true that she often said she didn’t know, but she disliked hearing this fact presented as though it were a character defect, particularly by Oscar, who seemed to have built an entire personality around knowing things that nobody had asked him to know. 

“Maybe I don’t know things,” she said. 

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“There you go,” Julian said. 

He was smiling, and for a moment she hated him, not passionately, but with something cool, administrative. The bartender brought another round. Outside, the rain had stopped, though water continued to fall intermittently from the awning above the entrance, striking the pavement with the sound of someone tapping a fingernail against a table. 

“Actually,” Oscar  said, “I think we’re afraid of being alone.”

Julian groaned. “Oh, here we go.” 

“No, I meant it. We do everything together. We eat together, we walk around together, we go to these stupid lectures together. Yesterday I went downstairs to buy cigarettes and Leona came with me.”

“I wanted gum.”

“You didn’t buy any.” 

“They didn’t have the kind I wanted.” 

“You didn’t ask.”

“I could see.”

Oscar smiled. “Fine.”

“Anyway,” Julian said, “what’s wrong with being afraid of being alone?” 

“Nothing.” 

“Then why bring it up?”

“Because I think it’s interesting.”

“Everything’s interesting to you.”

“Not everything.” 

“Name something that isn’t.”

Oscar glanced at Leona before answering. “Your photographs.”

Leona laughed so hard that she spilled a little beer on her coat. Julian looked wounded, then pleased, then wounded again, as though he had not yet decided which reaction would be most attractive.

“That’s a low blow,” he said. 

“It’s true.”

“I don’t take that many photographs.”

“You took 47 photographs of a staircase yesterday.”

“It was a beautiful staircase.”

“It was a staircase in a hotel.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t beautiful.”

Leona was still laughing. She felt a sudden, disproportionate affection for both of them, for their ridiculousness, their small vanities, the familiar arrangement of their faces above the table. She loved them, she thought, though the word seemed embarrassingly large for wanting them to remain there another hour, without revealing anything that might oblige her to change her opinion of them. Oscar had stopped laughing. He was watching her. 

Then Oscar said, “You know, I think you’re in love with him.” 

She stopped laughing. “With whom?”

“Julian.” 

Julian looked down at his beer, grinning. It was an intolerable grin, not because it was cruel, but because it suggested that he had been expecting this announcement for quite some time and was now waiting with a certain gentlemanly restraint to see how she would respond. 

“Don’t flatter him,” she said. 

Oscar shrugged. “I’m just saying.” 

“Well, don’t.” She looked at Oscar, but he had already turned toward Julian, as though the question were now his to answer.

For a moment nobody spoke. Leona watched a drop of water travel down the outside of her beer bottle, gathering speed as it approached the table, where it disappeared into the little ring of moisture beneath the glass. Something important seemed to have been decided without her participation. She wanted to ask Oscar whom he had meant to embarrass, but asking would confer an importance on the remark that it did not deserve. Instead, she said, “I think the professor is in love with Octavio Paz.”

Julian laughed, grateful for the opportunity. “He’s dead.” 

“That doesn’t seem to have stopped him.”

“Maybe that’s why he likes him,” Oscar said. 

They began laughing again, though less naturally this time, and Leona had the unpleasant sensation of hearing them imitate themselves. 

At the counter, the man who had been talking about his brother stood up. He placed several coins beside his empty glass, adjusted his jacket, and walked toward the door. As he passed their table he looked at Leona for a moment, not with interest exactly, but with the absent curiosity of someone who has momentarily forgotten what he came into the room to do. She looked back at him. He was perhaps 50, with a narrow face and tired eyes. There was nothing remarkable about him. He stepped into the street and Leona watched the door close. She thought of the four hair salons near the hotel, the women she had invented inside them, the cigarette seller under his blue tarpaulin, the professor and his imaginary friendships, the man who had sold wardrobes and spent twenty years remembering a prison he had never seen. She thought of the photograph above their table: perhaps it commemorated nothing more extraordinary than a meeting between two people who had subsequently forgotten one another. 

It occurred to her that this was what made people so exhausting: the necessity of remembering them. Not their names or their birthdays or the things they had said, but the particular configuration of their unhappiness, the little stories they told about themselves, the version of events they preferred, the versions they could not bear. She was tired, too, of being remembered incorrectly. 

“What’s wrong?” Julian asked. 

“Nothing.”

“You look sad.”

“I’m not sad.”

“All right.” He said this kindly, which made her feel worse. 

Oscar was looking toward the television. The football match had ended, and a man in a dark suit was discussing the result, his face reddening as he returned for the third time to an incident that had occurred in the first half. Leona wondered whether there were people who genuinely cared about such things, not merely as diversions but with the full force of their emotional capacities. Of course there were. There were people who cried when their teams lost. There were people who cried when strangers died. There were people who cried because their hair had been cut badly. She had once cried because a woman in a supermarket had called her “sweetheart.” She finished her beer. 

“I think we should go,” she said. 

They paid and went outside. The air was cold and smelled faintly of gasoline and wet concrete. A bus passed, almost empty, its interior lights illuminating the faces of three passengers who sat far apart from one another. Julian put his glasses back on; Oscar lit a cigarette. For a while they walked without speaking. 

At the corner, Julian slipped on the wet pavement and caught himself against a lamppost. It was an undignified movement, the kind that would have been funny had he not looked so frightened afterward. “Jesus Christ,” he said. Leona began to laugh. 

“Are you all right?” Oscar said. 

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She laughed harder. Julian looked at her, then began laughing too, and soon all three of them were standing beneath the lamppost, laughing helplessly, having lost, somewhere in the course of their drinking, any reliable sense of what constituted a joke. 

When they finally continued walking, Leona felt lighter, though she knew the feeling would not last. Already she could sense the evening beginning to arrange itself into memory, its disorderly moments becoming fixed and simplified, the things they had said losing their original meanings and acquiring others. By morning, Julian would remember Oscar’s accusation as a joke. Oscar would remember it as an observation. She would remember the expression on Julian’s face, though she was no longer certain what that expression had been. 

A block from the hotel they passed the first hair salon. Its shutters were down and above them a faded photograph showed a woman with astonishingly straight hair, smiling at something beyond the frame. Leona stopped to look at it. 

“What?” Oscar asked.

“Nothing.” She had wanted, suddenly and with an intensity that surprised her, to tell them about Haircut City, about the four salons and their imagined proprietors, about the mysterious economic principles governing their proximity, about the possibility that the women were friends, that they spent their Sundays discussing the shapes of other people’s heads. She had wanted to tell them everything, though she understood that there was very little to tell. 

But the moment passed. The boys were already halfway down the block, arguing about which of them had the room key. She hurried after them, her curls swollen in the damp air, her fringe coat brushing against her knees, and by the time she caught up, she had forgotten what she was going to say.

---

Mehr Sahni stands before four hair salons.