The Angel Esmeralda - By Don DeLillo Page 0,41

elderly people. But then she died.”

He was speaking distantly, Todd was, watching the man but talking through him, finding his shadow somewhere on the other side of the world. The man did not see us, I was sure of this. He reached the corner, one of his hands behind his back, the other making small conversational gestures, and then he turned onto the next street and was gone.

“Did you see his shoes?”

“They weren’t boots.”

“They were shoes that reach to the ankle.”

“High shoes.”

“Old World.”

“No gloves.”

“Jacket below the knees.”

“Possibly not his.”

“A hand-me-down or hand-me-up.”

“Think of the hat he’d be wearing if he was wearing a hat,” I said.

“He’s not wearing a hat.”

“But if he was wearing a hat, what kind of hat?”

“He’s wearing a hood.”

“But what kind of hat, if he was wearing a hat?”

“He’s wearing a hood,” Todd said.

We walked down to the corner now and started across the street. He spoke an instant before I did.

“There’s only one kind of hat he could conceivably wear. A hat with an earflap that reaches from one ear around the back of the head to the other ear. An old soiled cap. A peaked cap with a flap for the ears.”

I said nothing. I had nothing to say to this.

There was no sign of the man along the street he’d entered. For a couple of seconds an aura of mystery hovered over the scene. But his disappearance simply meant that he lived in one of the houses on the street. Did it matter which house? I didn’t think it mattered but Todd disagreed. He wanted a house that matched the man.

We walked slowly down the middle of the street, six feet apart, using rutted car tracks in the snow to make the going easier. He took off a glove and extended his hand, fingers spread and flexing.

“Feel the air. I say minus nine Celsius.”

“We’re not Celsius.”

“But he is, where he’s from, that’s Celsius.”

“Where is he from? There’s something not too totally white about him. He’s not Scandinavian.”

“Not Dutch or Irish.”

I wondered about Andalusian. Where was Andalusia exactly? I didn’t think I knew. Or an Uzbek, a Kazakh. But these seemed irresponsible.

“Middle Europe,” Todd said. “Eastern Europe.”

He pointed to a gray frame house, an ordinary two-story, with a shingled roof and no sign of the fallen grace that defined some of the houses elsewhere in town.

“Could be that one. His family allows him to take a walk now and then, provided he stays within a limited area.”

“The cold doesn’t bother him much.”

“He’s used to colder.”

“Plus, he has very little feeling in his extremities,” I said.

There was no Christmas wreath on the front door, no holiday lights. I didn’t see anything about the property that might suggest who lived there, from what background, speaking which language. We approached the point where the street ended in a patch of woods, and we turned and headed back.

We had class in half an hour and I wanted to speed up the pace. Todd was still looking at houses. I thought of the Baltic states and the Balkan states, briefly confused—which was which and which was where.

I spoke before he did.

“I see him as a figure who escaped the war in the 1990s. Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia. Or who didn’t leave until recently.”

“I don’t feel that here,” he said. “It’s not the right model.”

“Or he’s Greek, and his name is Spyros.”

“I wish you a painless death,” he said, not bothering to look my way.

“German names. Names with umlauts.”

This last had nothing but nuisance value. I knew that. I tried walking faster but he paused a moment, standing in his skewed way to look at the gray house.

“In a few hours, think of it, dinner’s over, the others are watching TV, he’s in his little room sitting on the edge of a narrow bed in his long johns, staring into space.”

I wondered if this was a space that Todd expected us to fill.

We waited through the long silences and then nodded when he coughed, in collegial approval. He’d coughed only twice so far today. There was a small puckered bandage at the edge of his jaw. He shaves, we thought. He cuts himself and says shit. He wads up a sheet of toilet paper and holds it to the cut. Then he leans into the mirror, seeing himself clearly for the first time in years.

Ilgauskas, he thinks.

We never took the same seats, class after class. We weren’t sure how this had started. One of us, in a spirit of offhand mischief,