One evening after the clapping she took their dog out for a walk around the neighborhood. Upon returning she spotted an old man with a Jack Russell on a leash, staring at the facade of her building. She nodded and tried to continue past him.
“Vives aquí?” He asked her.
“Yes, vivo aqui,” she responded in heavily accented Spanish.
“I speak English,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I was many years a teacher of English,” he said
He must have been at least ninety, she thought, and not particularly well-preserved.
“I lived in this building,” he pointed to the building she currently called home.
“I live here now,” she said.
He nodded, unimpressed.
“Many years…”
This time she nodded and tried to feign interest with a smile that she felt to be fake and American.
“It was bombed,” he said making an explosive noise with his mouth and spreading his fingers out as if they were shrapnel.
“While you lived here?”
“I was not home.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“Civil War,” he said, as if it explained everything. He shook his head for a moment that they both respected in silence.
“I had gone to the store for milk. Of course, there was no milk! My mom knew there was no milk. Why she sent me that morning on such a pointless task, I never understood.”
She suspected the tragic end that his story was pointing to and felt moved and embarrassed.
“I was walking home. I could see the building. A gypsy woman was sitting in front of it with a baby in her arms. She looked like the Virgin Mary, wrapped in a shawl. It was orange and blue. That pattern is printed on my brain.” He stared at the building as if he were flipping through time, locating the precise moment that the event had occurred and witnessing it all over again.
She thought that it wasn’t only the physical world that she dug through in her work, but this world too, the world of pain and joy and memory and expectations fulfilled and otherwise. It wasn’t the bone fragments that she was interested in, but the life that once animated them. It wasn’t the shard of pottery, it was the potter, the cook, the little children who had dug their hands into its sweet contents. It was the collective residue of all those past experiences and all that past consciousness.
“When the bomb fell, I don’t remember any noise. No boom. No flash. No flame. Silence and dust. The woman and the baby,” he snapped his fingers, “gone.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. This time she knew her emotion was real as it swelled from her heart and lungs into her mouth and eyes. “And your family?”
He looked softly into her eyes, then shifted his gaze back towards the building, panning his vision across the entirety of the facade from the roof, down to where the pastel yellow stucco met the thin sidewalk.
She noticed a hole in the pavement near where they stood that exposed the cobblestone that still lay beneath them. How beautiful, she thought, the city must have been then, the red of the brick under gas lamps, horses and donkeys still traversing the streets. Who could possibly have been so crass to just pave it all over?
“There used to be a trap door here,” he pointed to a section of the yellow facade, “where the trucks would deliver coal for the furnace.”
The air must have been asphyxiating with all the buildings of Madrid burning coal in their cellars. Some pasts, she thought, were best buried.
“It took them years to rebuild. I walked by every afternoon of my youth and yelled into that opening in the hopes that someone would answer,” he smiled but his eyes glistened with the hint of tears that would not be realized. “Even now, when I look at this new building, something in me doesn’t quite believe that they aren’t still there, waiting for me, waiting for their milk.”
She crouched on the sidewalk, tears running through her fingers and onto her lips. The man leaned his cane against the building and lowered himself slowly to her level. He handed her a handkerchief. She took it and cleared the mucus from her nose. She took a deep breath and let out a short laugh. “I’m so sorry… I can’t believe that you are here comforting me… I just…” She looked up and saw that tears were running down his cheeks too.
“In all these years, I never cried…” he smiled.
Laughter completely overtook her as the absurdity of the situation availed itself to them both.
“Come,” he said, staring and offering his hand.
“I shouldn’t… The virus… I don’t want to…”
“Take my hand,” he said.
She took his hand and stood, taking care not to put too much of her weight onto him as she stood. “Thank you,” she said.
He nodded.
“Oh, God, thank you so much…”
She reached into her pocket, took out a small bottle of hand sanitizer and offered it to him.
He shook his head. “I don’t believe in what I can’t see.”
She looked to the place on the facade where he had indicated the long-gone coal shoot. He seemed to hear her thoughts.
“Well, it can’t hurt,” he said extending his hand. She squeezed a drop onto his palm and he rubbed his hands together. “Thank you,” he said, pushing his mask back into place and turning to walk away.
She inhaled, briefly imagining that she detected the scent of burning coal. She watched as he slowly made his way to the corner and disappeared to her forever.