The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page B

hadn’t reckoned his numbers well and got stuck pairing an Iranian woman with a Salvadoran one. Almost at once the two turned from each other back to their own compatriots, so that soon all English had given way to the usual sniping in Farsi and Spanish.
    He ended the class a good twenty minutes early. Milly stood frowning at the door of the front office as his students filtered away. All Alex’s hopes for his party had drained by now. In any event, he had been a fool to imagine he would ever have had the nerve to invite María.
    As he was packing his things Miguel sidled up to him.
    “Bad day, yes?”
    Alex let this pass. He clicked shut his book bag, then said, as inertly as he could manage, “I see your sister isn’t here today.”
    He knew at once that he’d made a mistake.
    “No,” Miguel said slowly. “Not today.”
    The bastard. He was playing with him.
    Alex said nothing.
    “She got son’ meeting,” Miguel said finally.
    “Oh? What kind of meeting?”
    “Don’ know. Son’ kind of political thing. I say, María, why you want son’ political thing when they break our balls for that back home. But she say is a better way to learn things, in those meetings, than coming here.”
    Alex took the cut like a man, showing Miguel no pain. Meanwhile, María grew ever more remote: he imagined her part of some underground resistance cell, fighting for the end of El Salvador’s dirty war.
    “You wan’ a coffee or son’thing?” Miguel said.
    Alex knew he should just put him off.
    “I dunno. I’m pretty busy.”
    “You come to my home,” Miguel said. “I make you Salvadoran coffee.”
    Alex had to remind himself that he was indeed busy. But next to that was the prospect of seeing the rooms she lived in, of smelling her smell there, of running into her.
    “Is close,” Miguel said. “You come.”
    Somehow, Alex found himself trailing after Miguel into the crooked side streets of St. Henri. The few times Alex had been through here he’d stuck to the main roads, but Miguel was leading him on a whole zigzagging sweep through the place, across vistas that might as easily have been the barrios of San Salvador as Montreal. They passed dead-end streets that disappeared under the expressway, garbage-strewn empty lots, stretches of warehouse and corrugated-tin sheds behind which the skyline of the downtown rose up like a foreign country.
    They crossed an area of rubble and blight to a tiny street of old barracks-style row houses that opened out to the rail yards and the badlands of the canal. There was a smell here of old ice and something else, like the humic smell of thaw but a bit ranker than that, a bit sour. The houses came up so hard against the street it seemed a violation to pass infront of them, the blue of midday TVs visible through the yellowed curtains. Miguel led him through a door at the end of the street and up a tottery staircase to a flat on the second floor. The whole of the place could be held in your eye in a glance, a tiny fifties-era kitchen at the back and then two rooms connected by a double doorway, the front one blocked off by a flowered sheet that had been tacked to the door frame. Out back, through a flimsy storm door that led out to the fire escape, Alex caught a glimpse of cluttered back yards, half of them strung with laundry to take advantage of the spring sun.
    “Is my home,” Miguel said, smiling broadly. “Come.”
    The middle room seemed to be Miguel’s. There was a small Formica-topped table with three battered chrome-and-rattan chairs, a worn corduroy loveseat, an unmade bed on the floor. Scotch-taped on the wall above the bed, in a fairly orderly fashion, were a Playboy centerfold of a decidedly Aryan blonde and a few smaller pictures of musclemen in various poses probably taken from some body-building magazine.
    Miguel had seen Alex’s eye go to the centerfold.
    “You like it?”
    Alex felt himself flush.
    “Not really my taste.”
    Miguel pulled a little curtain back