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At five in the morning the air was warming into a new day. There was the softest of taps on the bedroom door.
‘It is me, it is Esposa,’ said a voice.
John Webb hesitated, half-dressed, numb on his feet from lack of sleep, then opened the door.
‘What a night, what a night!’ said Señor Esposa, coming in, shaking his head, laughing gently. ‘Did you hear that noise? Yes? They tried to come up here to your room. I prevented this.’
‘Thank you,’ said Leonora, still in bed, turned to the wall.
‘They were all old friends. I made an agreement with them, anyway. They were drunk enough and happy enough so they agreed to wait. I am to make a proposition to you two.’ Suddenly he seemed embarrassed. He moved to the window. ‘Everyone is sleeping late. A few are up. A few men. See them there on the far side of the plaza?’
John Webb looked out at the plaza. He saw the brown men talking quietly there about the weather, the world, the sun, this town, and perhaps the wine.
‘Señor, have you ever been hungry in your life?’
‘For a day, once.’
‘Only for a day. Have you always had a house to live in and a car to drive?’
‘Until yesterday.’
‘Were you ever without a job?’
‘Never.’
‘Did all of your brothers and sisters live to be twenty-one years old?’
‘All of them.’
‘Even I,’ said señor Esposa, ‘even I hate you a little bit now. For I have been without a home. I have been hungry. I have three brothers and one sister buried in that graveyard on the hill beyond the town, all dead of tuberculosis before they were nine years old.’
señor Esposa glanced at the men in the plaza. ‘Now, I am no longer hungry or poor, I have a car, I am alive. But I am one in a thousand. What can you say to them out there today?’
‘I’ll try to think of something.’
‘Long ago I stopped trying. señor, we have always been a minority, we white people. I am Spanish, but I was born here. They tolerate me.’
‘We have never let ourselves think about our being a minority/ said Webb, ‘and now it’s hard to get used to the fact.’
‘You have behaved beautifully.’
‘Is that a virtue?’
‘In the bull-ring, yes, in war, yes, in anything like this, most assuredly y
es. You do not complain, you do not make excuses. You do not run and make a spectacle of yourself. I think you are both very brave.’
The hotel manager sat down, slowly, helplessly.
‘I’ve come to offer you the chance to settle down,’ he said.
‘We wanted to move on, if possible.’
The Manager shrugged. ‘Your car is stolen, I can do nothing to get it back. You cannot leave town. Remain then and accept my offer of a position in my hotel.’
‘You don’t think there is any way for us to travel?’
‘It might be twenty days, señor, or twenty years. You cannot exist without money, food, lodging. Consider my hotel and the work I can give you.’
