In An Arid Land Read Online Free

nicer, larger, with two small rooms upstairs for the boys and her own room below. It was here, she told herself, that she would start her life over.

    Angelica goes to her new landlady's house to get the key and pay the rent. The landlady is the daughter of the old man whose house she is taking now, now that his wife is dead and he can no longer tend to his affairs. He lives with the daughter in a fine old place just a few blocks from the house Angelica is renting.
    He is sitting at the kitchen table when Angelica arrives. The daughter, a slim woman with graying hair, is nervous but friendly. She has never been a landlady before, never had an old one to care for, and she is uncertain just how to go about it.
    The viejito is very old. He sits at the table with his hands folded in his lap. He wears baggy trousers and a baggy shirt; his feet are bare. His head is bald but for thin silvery patches on the sides above his long purple ears, and the skin is splotched. His face is thin, the cheeks sunken, the chin gray with days' old stubble, but his eyes are brilliant and blue.
    He looks at Angelica fiercely, directly, almost aggressively with those brilliant blue eyes, as if she is an interloper or a loved one who has disappointed. In fact he stares at her quite rudely until the daughter says, "Papa? Papa!" in a loud voice. "Papa, don't be so rude, don't stare at our guest."
    His eyes blink but his gaze does not shift or change.
    "He hasn't been quite the same since Mother died," the daughter says to Angelica. "They were together forty-seven years, you see, and he remembers too well at times, the old days, and he forgets too well sometimes tooisn't that right, Papa?"
    "Yes!" the old man says to quiet his daughter's prattle and then suddenly he changes, he softens. Looking softly at Angelica, he asks, "Did you ever find that earring you lost in the bedroom, the pearl I gave you as a wedding present?"
    He smiles now as if speaking in fondness his blue eyes dance a bit; there is something playful and lusty and familiar in them and he tilts his head awaiting an answer. It is all incredible and disquieting to Angelica, this question, this coincidence. Not long ago she did indeed lose an earring, much cherished, and she couldn't find it when packing to move. She knows though; she knows he is not truly speaking to her but to that other woman whose house and bedroom he shared all those years.
    "Papa," says the daughter in her embarrassment, touching his arm, "this is not Mama, this is Angelica," and yet the old man waits and smiles expecting an answer.
    Angelica smiles too now and says, because he wants her to be the woman he thinks she is, "No, I didn't find it. It's still lost, there in the bedroom somewhere."
    He is very pleased by her answer. His smile changes, deepens to one of regret and compassion and resignation to the unknown parts of life, the elusive ways of small hidden things. There is a touch of pity too, and even more, something else.
    "So then," he says with a kind of masculine decisiveness. "I'll have to have a look later. My eyes are better than yours."
    "Yes," she says. "They always have been."
    "Hah! That's true, I got the eyes, you got the ears and the bazoobs," he says, eyes blazing and playful, tongue showing lewdly between his teeth, and without a hint of shame he cups his hands and moves them vaguely before his chest.
    "You should know," says Angelica in a lilting, teasing voice, almost laughing now at their game.
    The old man rolls his eyes and tosses his head he is nearly ecstatic now with joy and delight and then he flops back in his chair. He lets out one loud laugh.
    The daughter is mystified and a bit mortified by this conversation between her father and this stranger. She glances at Angelica with a look that says, Don't encourage him, please.
    "He gets confused at times," she says. Then: "Papa? Papa, would you like to take a walk?" Then: "He likes to walk through the neighborhood. Everyone knows him. They