Enrique Nights

 

We walk the loop around the neighborhood, the three of us, down the main street where people gather in fours and fives beneath the awnings of lighted storefronts and linger in barbershop doorways, sandals shuffling in the grit, their conversation muffled by the chainsaw buzz of motorbikes and a wake of pale exhaust.

One, in a black blazer and well-shined shoes that gleam under the streetlamps, recounts his day's university lesson-- early Celtic civilization-- speaking deliberately, almost angrily, as though doing so turns his words into proof. The other, reserved and musing, makes owl calls through cupped hands and offers bits of incidental poetry: Only the cricket can play his instrument.

Turning up a side street and into the alleyways between unfinished houses-- oppressive, hollow gray towers-- we rattle the iron window cages with our fingers as we pass like a playing card on bicycle spokes, mocking their efforts to protect; there is no one to keep out and nothing to hold in.

Who knows what all we talk about. We eat peanuts from paper cones, they bicker about everything, walking on either side of me, and brief quiet cricket interludes are quickly filled with misheard Latin pop lyrics that haunt me for days.

In the open expanse of a playing field at the end of the row, a breeze and the shadows of skulking dogs slip through the long grass. The air is warm and sweet with fragile traces of orange blossom. The lights of town hover above the basin beneath where the buildings rest invisible; mountains loom on the periphery with a presence darker than the obsidian curtain of sky.

We circle back around where the lights paint the street with the feeling of home and pressure cookers hiss from open windows, shaking hands and saying our "good evenings" at the corner near my door patterned over with the swaying shadows of fig leaves.