Ray of the Star (5 page)

T
wo days later, Harry opened them again with a plan, or rather the bright beginnings of one, and while, after so recently spending so much time on the inside of his head, one might expect that a good deal of slightly soggy thinking had gone into reaching it—a long-ago colleague, subjected to a lengthy dose of Harry’s thought process, once compared it to the higgledy-piggledy fretwork of boards laid down in pre-modern times across bogs and marshes, the remains of which could still be found, along with the victims of their treachery, in certain regions of Europe—on this occasion, Harry had simply woken, legs still twitching, with a bucket of golden paint floating before his eyes, so that after he had spent a bit of time with the local yellow pages, executed his ablutions, and made a lightning dash, back pressed against the side of the building, behind and past Señora Rubinski, who was standing outside the door tapping her foot, he paid a visit to Almundo’s Store for Living Statues, which he had selected as much for the size of its advertisement—twice that of Ernesto’s Living Statue Emporium—as for its proximity to his apartment, nor was he disappointed, as Almundo was able with great efficiency and appealing panache to kit Harry out with everything—including gilded armor, gilded box, gilded lance, golden body paint, body-paint remover, a large duffel bag—he would need to make a most convincing living statue, one that would, according to Almundo, attract the greatest sympathy of passersby and provide the foundation upon which he could transmit the full flourishing of his artistry,

“Speaking of which,” Harry said, “any suggestions?”

“Stand very still, my friend,” said Almundo, “stand very, very still,”

“And beyond that?” Harry asked,

“Look down, think happy thoughts, and bathe every evening to keep your skin from breaking out,” said Almundo,

“Thank you, I will,” said Harry, eager to get started, but already dusk was sweeping through the city, lights were flicking on, and as he alternated between hefting and dragging his duffel bag, it became clearer and clearer that he would have to wait until the next day to make his debut, which did not stop him, once he had done a medium-length tour of duty with Señora Rubinski, from spending a quiet hour on his box in front of the wall mirror in his bedroom, dressed and made up as what had been pitched to him by Almundo as the one and only “Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” but which, at least in the problematic light of his floor lamp, made him look dangerously like some kind of laminated hobgoblin or gigantic duck.

S
till, he rose very early the next morning, ate some hard sausage and a tomato, drank half a bottle of sparkling water, applied his makeup, packed his duffel bag, and made his way to the slowly waking boulevard where he set himself up in what he recalled being a largish gap in the line of statues—of which there were none yet in sight, it being far too early—at a point he decided was more or less equidistant between the golden centaur and a large flower kiosk, and had the advantage of being situated directly beneath one of the largest plane trees on the boulevard, which, during the heat of the day, would provide him with some measure of shade, and then, with a steady stream of locals on their way to work and a few sleepy tourists heading for fresh juice, melons, packets of nuts, and glass cups of milky coffee at the market drifting past him, he planted his golden box, pulled on his golden costume, did a few preemptive deep knee bends and arm stretches, swiped at the air with his lance, then stepped up and struck an overly elaborate pose—a sort of supplicant’s arrangement he had puzzled out the previous evening in front of the mirror in lieu of his normal anti-RLS routine—which he held for what seemed like ages, but was really more like three minutes, and then tried another, and another, and so began a very long day, one that, by the by, involved assorted insults, copious sweating, a cornucopia of low-grade pains, far too much thinking about the folly of human endeavor generally and his own specifically, and a patent inability not to forget that he was meant to be a statue of sorts and crane his neck in order to catch a glimpse of the silver angel, who, when in the early afternoon she appeared one hundred meters up from him, he could just see shining off in the distance like a silver suffix to all that had gone wrong in his life and a silver prefix to all that might, if he could only—fat chance—hold his position long enough, and, over time, move his box far enough up the boulevard, still go right.

W
hile Harry stood, woeful, let’s face it, indeed, on his box under the giant plane tree, already well aware—even with downcast eyes one could both see and of course hear the snickering—that the passersby, when they arrived at the silver angel, would now include him along with the other second and third raters in their commentary when they stood in wonder before her beautiful, broken face and extraordinary wings, Solange stood on her own box thinking about the little salmon-colored slip of paper with the number she now realized—having gotten over the sense of desperation that had set in after no one had arrived that evening in the café to collect her—she very much wished to redial, while being cognizant that upon returning home after having been, so to speak, stood up in what had felt like her hour of greatest need, instead of covering it in the Lucite she had on hand and that she used almost daily on certain objects in a largely unarticulated attempt to afford them some measure of permanence or protection, she had torn it to shreds and thrown it out the window and watched it float down through leaves and lights toward the street below her building, and that although for days she had combed the ground inside and out of the subway she had not found a replacement, only gum wrappers, beer bottle labels, shopping lists, burned photographs, bits of plastic and endless shards of shattered colored glass, the whole, it seemed to her, threatening to rise as if caught in fierce winds and blot out whatever dim light she was still able to shine on the calming songs she had always sung to herself: in short, still not so good and maybe even a little worse, the mental state of Solange, the silver angel, and it was certainly untainted by any awareness that a woeful knight/laminated hobgoblin/my God, what the fuck are you supposed to be, friend? had set up his shop down the boulevard in hopes of eventually edging his way into her peripheral and maybe, eventually, frontal vision: how strange the storms, some small, some large, that are forever sweeping over us before we’ve even had a chance to think “I must seek shelter,” and Ireneo, meanwhile, had taken up jogging.

R
ediscovered jogging might be more accurate in this instance, as Ireneo had once done a very good deal of jogging indeed, so much so that at university, when he was still “on track” to take a degree in contemporary finance and assume a position in his mother’s accounting firm, which would have given him, even at the entry level, access to a company car and a company apartment and an expense account pointed skyward—in other words “the works”—he had been a member of the school running club, and had often finished near the head of the pack when informal races were organized, but that had been long ago, so long in fact that when, after Doña Eulalia had asked him to step up his efforts to find Harry and Solange, and he had thought of how much more distance he could cover at a run, he was no longer aware that he still owned a pair of beat-up but serviceable Asics running shoes, so that their apparent apparition—he had set them there, in the guise of bookends, so long ago that they had ceased, in any meaningful way, to exist—on either end of the mantel over the blocked-up fireplace in his modest studio, with their shoelaces intact but wildly akimbo, read to him as an extispicic instance whose meaning would only become clear after he had laced up the shoes and used them to put an end to his search, so after digging out a pair of cotton socks, he had pulled them on, taken a long pull on a bottle of sparkling water, and run out his front door, into the city, where although obviously he had done nothing in the way of training in years, he had found that, even in slacks and rather a tight linen shirt, he could run without pause for hour upon hour, as if his feet were enchanted, the thought of which prompted the slightest of smiles to infiltrate his otherwise impassive features, happy occurrence that lit his turquoise eyes and further lifted his cheekbones, so that it would have been hard to say whether all the men and women who looked at him as he ran past were doing so because he was loping along in his street clothes or because he was so striking, which of course is neither here nor there, except that eyes and faces flipped in his direction as if pulled sharply by a string and for a time Ireneo found this distracting and worried that all the attention he was receiving would negatively impact on his ability to search, but just as he was thinking this it seemed to him that his old shoes began whispering to him—
turn left at the next corner, run as close as you can to the beautiful display of antique toy cars in that shop window, nod at the construction worker who is having trouble negotiating that alley with his untrustworthy backhoe, sprint across the chalk-colored museum courtyard where the skateboarders hold sway, cut through the market but don’t run or barely run and make sure to lift and sniff a melon or a papaya as you go, hum a little, jog above the sea and take in deep gulps of the fresh air, take a turn down the boulevard—
and he liked the sound of this whispering, which kept him company even as, at stoplights, he was obliged to run in place, though he also found it moderately unsettling and decided to ask Doña Eulalia what she thought about it, when after he completed his search he saw her next, which, he had a feeling, now that he had rediscovered these marvelous shoes, wouldn’t—just as Doña Eulalia had predicted—be long.

T
hat both Doña Eulalia and Ireneo proved to be wrong—in the short term because Ireneo’s old Asics, for reasons all their own, instructed him to keep his head pointed pavementward on the boulevard; in the slightly longer term because Ireneo’s mother, who now lived in elegant retirement up the coast, fell gravely ill and required his immediate attendance—was far from unfortunate in re the potential of an eventual dynamic unfolding between the silver angel and the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, not least because the information that Doña Eulalia was ever more eager to provide them most likely would have, had it been imparted too early, especially the portion concerning Harry and the candles, had a chilling effect, difficult to overcome, even on considerably more solid ground than that provided by a gold box moving (even only in potential—Harry didn’t yet think he was ready) toward a silver box (which had no idea said gold box was coming), on the crowded matrix of a pedestrian thoroughfare so bustling, so full, as they say, of life and its attendant distractions, and detractors/detractions, such as the three old men who, just as Harry, four days into his self-imposed calvary, was beginning, in great earnest, to consider packing it in for the afternoon, came and stood before him, folded their arms over their chests, and launched into a withering appraisal of Harry’s utter lack not just of artistry, but also of even the smallest degree of presence, to the point, as they put it, that he was almost invisible,

“Yes practically invisible,” one of them said,

“I can’t believe we noticed him,”

“But of course we did,”

“In the end,”

“Still, we did see him,”

“He’s not invisible enough,”

“This is not a promising debut,”

“Another sorry Don,”

“Just like last year’s,”

“Although last year’s was better,”

“Marginally, but it’s true that silver is better for the Don,”

“The Don must be skinny, this one isn’t skinny, I don’t say he’s fat, but he’s certainly not skinny,”

“That’s not the worst of it though,”

“No, it’s not the worst of it,”

I’m a statue,
Harry thought,
I can’t move, I can’t talk, the bastards, or can I? is this some kind of a test?

“He should reconsider,”

“I bet he got that getup at Almundo’s, the old swindler,”

“We ought to talk to Almundo sometime, pay a visit, it’s been a while,”

“His makeup is running,”

“He looks like a giant duck,”

“The Don looked ridiculous, but not like a duck,”

I don’t believe this,
Harry thought,

“He’s hopeless,”

“Won’t last the week,”

“Shouldn’t last the week,”

“We know you can hear us, friend,”

“Unless he’s a foreigner, one who doesn’t speak the language,”

“Everyone speaks the language,”

“He looks familiar to me,”

“Everyone looks familiar,”

“That’s a long way from being true,”

“It’s clear he’s listening,”

“The Don wears an old barber bowl for a helmet, that piece of plastic on his head is a poor replica of a real Knight’s helmet,”

“And where is the beard and Rosinante for that matter?”

“You can’t expect him to have a horse, none of the Dons ever had a horse,”

“But one had a Sancho Panza,”

“That Sancho Panza was little more than a stuffed hippo,”

“Let’s go and have some bubbly,”

“With those lovely olives,”

“And a bit of salted cod,”

“He doesn’t have the touch,”

“Neither a buffoon nor an artist,”

“Neither here nor there,”

“There’s a word for that,”

“The word is ‘fucked,’”

Jesus Christ,
Harry thought, and after the three old men had uncrossed their arms and gone off to have their goddamn drink and olives, he dropped his lance, shook off his shield, sat down on his box, and fumbled in his duffel bag for a bottle of sparkling water, which to top it all off had come uncapped and was now empty, then looked up the boulevard and saw that, no doubt during his dressing down, the silver angel had vanished, not the first time she had done this while he was not looking, in fact she had managed to do it each day he had come and stood on his box and sweated and been snickered at,
I’m so out of here,
Harry thought, which was when his neighbor, the golden centaur, now free of all but his golden body paint, came and tapped him on the shoulder, shook his hand, introduced himself as Alfonso, and invited him for a drink.