Bella

She said the night was lovely. Bella, bella, she said, leaning deep into the word, cupping it like water, licking it from tiny, transparent reservoirs.

You aren’t sure if it’s rhetorical, merely commentative, or invitational. Come, she says, pulling you by the hand from the kitchen and out onto the terrace in front. Not rhetorical, apparently.

The door to the terrace is already open. (The door is always open.) Fresh air at the expense of a warm home, you've often mused. On cloudy days the breeze whistles through the hallways of the fourth-floor apartment like an arctic Passover.

Look, she says, sweeping her arm across the night sky like its proud artisan. See?

You step across the threshold onto the terrace and look up into the familiar, blinking star canopy. Eyes illumined, you blink, brightly, back at them.

Exhaling, you repeat your host mom’s favorite phrase. Bella, bella, you say, trying to lean into the word like water, like she does.

You point to Orion’s belt only question your observation. But we’re in the southern hemisphere, you point out.

No, no, no, they assure you. Your host father has joined too. We’re on the equator, they say.

Ahh. You pause. So you see everything.

Your host mom tries to point out Venus, twice, but your host father repudiates each time. You and your host mom look at each other and laugh.

Your host sister, Ana Maria, and her boyfriend also join you on the terrace. Practially the whole family, you think. In the city’s cool dusk, Ana María hugs the should of her boyfriend from behind, pressing her chin and mouth into his sweater. You half-smile, enjoying watching them together.

On the street four stories below, Emilia, your younger host sister, waits in the car with her boyfriend. Your host mom notices the two sitting in the running vehicle and waves, gesturing—smiling—to you to do the same. So you do. Then your host father, then Ana María and her boyfriend catch on. Finally, spontaneously, Ana María plucks up the dog, Thea, from the tiled floor of the terrace and she waves too. You look around at the others, all smiling foolishly. 

Emilia, below, waves back, twisting her neck and body in uncomfortable ways to peer out of the car’s windshield and up at the six of you on the terrace (including dog). She has big teeth and a slightly crooked smile. Her teeth glint through the windshield of the car like ground stars, bottom dwellers.

You look away, up again into bottomless well of the sky, and don’t see any difference.

Pan

Saturday, January 4. Quito, Ecuador

Perhaps it is customary to buy your bread the night before. Perhaps Ecuadorian bakeries respect the Catholic day-of-rest (a some four-hundred year habit?) and remain closed on Sundays. Perhaps breakfast bread is scarce if not absent from the kitchen table when it isn't bought beforehand. 

            Regardless, I was surprised by the line of perhaps twenty people that brushed the finger-stained glass of the panadería's bakery case in Quito's north district at dusk on a Saturday night.

While my host mother and I were being served by the employee behind  the chin-level counter, I noticed a couple sitting at a booth, a mess of  shapely coke bottles, fancy coffees in the hummingbird dishes that old, American diners serve ice cream in, and crumbly pastries littering their round table. Actually, it was the child I noticed first, the couple sitting nearby only as a product of the child's gaze.

Of course, I couldn't see the child's face, but I could tell from the skin at the nape of his neck and the slight shadows that licked his small jawline that he was dark. Dark like the rain-stained bark of a Michigan pine after an August storm. Dark hair, too, which covered his head like a child playing at pirates or buccaneers, slinging his mother's mixing bowls over his head and covering his eyes. 

His clothes were disheveled, loose, dirty even, and he stood alone. His parents weren't the fashionable couple sitting steps away at the table, nor the few other seated clients in the bakery. In fact, his parents weren't clients at all.

My gaze suddenly sought the two indigenous women standing at the shop's entrance, hawking strawberries and cherries to the unwilling and entirely unreceptive Ecuadorian middle class. These people obviously didn't buy their fruit from street venders; the women's strawberry mountains resembled the western Pichincha, the volcano that towers over the city like Sapo Inca, their mountains undiminished despite the Saturday traffic. 

The child, apparently, accompanied his mother. Perhaps he entered the bakery out of restless, three-year-old energy, out of curiosity. Maybe he was accustomed to the compassion of dining guests. 

Either way, the woman sitting at the table steps away noticed his gaze. She lifted her hand in the upside-down beckon of the Latino cultures—al reves—and handed the child the remains of a sticky-bun. The child was cautious to approach the stranger, cautious to take the pilled napkin-wrapped pastry, cautious to nibble the treat. Even at three, the child sensed the rigid class divisions that separate Quito's privileged from its largely indigenous poor.

I turned away then. I turned back to the counter, where my host mom was paying for some fourteen rolls. I turned away from the women, who was smiling, and the child, who was hungry, or restless, or merely bored. I turned away, and was glad the women didn't need to verify some abject justification—glad boredom was, for a moment, undistinguished from poverty, as good a reason as any to give a child bread.