her name. “I remember, when I dated this guy from the naval yard across from the center. Cesar.” She spoke, breathlessly, laughing. “Now don’t get jealous.” Andreas was laughing too as they were rushed down the street. His arms were pinned to his sides by the children hanging on him. “He was a lieutenant. Everytime I went out with him, our picture would show up in the newspaper.” She felt the pleasure about to erupt in her. “I guess you’re right. I was a regular celebrity in this city. I completely forgot that.” They reached the church at the bottom of the Santa Marta hill stairs. The children rushed her around the corner. She almost had to run. Everyone knew where she wanted to go. To the Community Center. Their group moved toward the plaza at the bottom of Santa Ana hill. It was a beautiful plaza filled with more giant palms and wrought iron benches painted white. In the distance the brown river Guayas flowed to the right of the hill. It was the plaza where the stones had been hurled at her. Where Rina had protected her. But today it looked safe and peaceful with the shaggy heads of the trees ruffling in the breeze off the river. She stopped. Something was wrong. The Center wasn’t there. No. Maybe in her excitement she wasn’t seeing it right. The cement wall around the Center property was there. The large green metal door that opened into the yard was there, closed. She looked up. Her apartment that overlooked the Center, higher on the hill was there. But not the Center below. From where she stood on the plaza she should be able to see the wooden unpainted building and the corrugated tin roof and the sign reading, Centro Communal de Santa Ana, rising above the outside wall. She turned to the boy Ramondo, who had stayed close by her side. “Hijo, where is the Community Center?” “ Ya se fue, Nina Caitlina." He moved his hand through the air and made a face of disgust. “The beer company, they wrecked it.” “What’s going on?” Andreas came toward her, still laughing with pleasure from the walk. “Our Community Center isn't here anymore.” ’ “You’ve got to be kidding.” He looked where she pointed “I’m not kidding. The fuckers destroyed it.” Even in her rage she was careful to glide over the word fuck. The children knew the word. It was popular here, a word associated with gringos and prostitutes. “I mean it was all one big fucking waste.” “Caitlina!" A woman’s high shout came from the direction of the hill. Caitlin saw a round black haired woman running down the stairs across the street in her direction. She had children surrounding her as well. It was Gala. And now the tears came. She didn’t try to hold them back. She felt foolish, but she had no choice. She was in Gala’s arms. Soft arms. Large soft breasts just below her own. Stiff stra k hair agains e. Gala smelled of roasted coffee beans and garlic and hair oil. “I told them you would come back to me, Caitlita, my Caitlita, I told them. They said I was loca, but I swore you would.” .A s they walked up the stairs to the house, more and more people flocked around them. The word had been sent up the hill. When they got inside the build- ing, Gala told everyone to go away. She 14 Clinton St. Quarterly yelled that they would all have their turn, then she closed the outside door with a bang. It was dark in the hallway. The only light came in through the transom. “I don’t live there anymore,” Gala pointed proudly at the door of her old apartment and began to mount the sloping wooden stairs. “I live where the gringa Caitlina used to live. I’ve become rich like you.” She laughed heartily, turning back to Caitlin. She was high enough upon the stairs so that the shaft of light from the transom spotlighted her mocha-skinned face. Her smile was the same toothless one, sending the dimple of her right cheek deep in. The girls scrambled past them and Gala and up the stairs. Nothing mattered for the moment to Caitlin but the smell of the old rotting wooden stairs swaying under her feet. When they rounded the turn and went up to the landing and she saw her own door, she had to hold back the tears again. In a way she wished she were here alone. She wanted to touch everything, and sit down on the landing and gaze at the maroon paint that was scratched and scarred. The ochre paint that began above it at waist height. The horizontal rectangle cut into the top of the cane wall with heavy mesh nailed over it, that served as the air vent for the bathroom. She wanted to see herself here too, entering this door each night at about nine, exhausted, depleted after a fourteen hour day. She wanted to know why she’d worked so hard, why she’d cried most nights and thought she was failing. Why she felt there was no place for herself, for her own privacy, her own joy. The only joy she remembered that was truly hers was the time she’d spent with Gala. But even that was often justified as work. The Americans came in a flat bed truck loaded with four-foot blonde dolls with blue eyes that blinked, cartons of soccer balls and baseball mitts, bolts of the richest brocade. People from the hill trampled each other to get to the things. The door opened, and the wind brought back its vivid first impression. Back then the wind had come whipping pff the river, especially on the winter nights in August. It would be so cold in the apartment that she’d have to wear sweaters and sweatpants to bed. At first she’d thought it was funny to be freezing in the tropics. After the novelty wore off, she just felt cold. The shutters on the floor to ceiling windows were open. The living room was filled with light. Gala had the same furniture she'd had downstairs. The wooden love seat and three straight-backed chairs. She’d tacked some red plastic on the arms and backs for decoration. The turquoise painted cane walls were covered with Coca Cola ads and calendars with pictures of pretty gringa-looking women on them. At the far side of the room, between the windows and the corner, Gala had made an altar on the top of a clothes dresser. Three devotional candles were burning. Propped behind the candles were two photographs. One of the baby Jorjito when he was born. The other of the child in the coffin. Caitlin looked away. She walked over to the windows and then turned back. Gala stood in the center of the room with her hands clasped over her belly. She was smiling proudly. “It’s beautiful, Gala, very beautiful,” Caitlin said. Caitlin stood at the front window leaning out over the iron banisters. The city of Guayaquil spread out in pastel before her, bounded on the left by the muddy, river. The air off the river was hot and moist. She could see directly down to where the Community Center had been. She tried to picture the long corrugated roof, with the stones and sticks and balls stuck on top. The kids were always throwing things up there to aggravate the women working inside during the afternoon. But she couldn’t fit it into the space. It looked too small. How could an entire building have gone in there and still left room for the soccer playing field in front? “Was that where it was?” Andreas leaned around outside from the next window. “Yes,” she said. > Gala came to stand by her. She was close enough that the bare solid skin of her arm touched Caitlin’s. It felt cool. The girls clamored around Andreas. She could hear them exclaiming over the blonde hair on his arms. “They tore it down,” Gala said. “A little after you left, the men from the cer- veceria came. They said they needed a place to store their beer bottles. That they’d only loaned it to us for the Center. Now that we didn’t have the beautiful gringita, we didn’t need a Center.” “Did people try to stop them? Did Jorge?” Gala shrugged. “What can we do Caitlin? We’re poor.” "Gala, you know better." “Yo se. Yo se. I know what you’re going to tell me, Nina. The power wasn’t with you. It was with us. With an organized us. Pues.” Weil. Her face fell t It isn’t true. After you left we had no power. We had no one to speak and smile sweetly to the gobierno for us." (Caitlin and Andreas stood side by side in the window. Gala was in the kitchen making food for them. Gladys and Maria had been sent for beer. The three other girls were down at Sehorita Marta’s, to give Caitlin some quiet, Gala said. They could come up when the food was ready. “The beer company takes the Center away from them—the one tangible thing they’ve built together—and they just accept it. What the hell did I do here?” “You did your best by these people, Cait. You didn’t destroy them and y didn’t perform miracles.” “But I didn’t even help them to see that they had power to get the things they need. Minimal things like electricity and running water. Five buildings up the hill all of that stops. No water. No light.” She pointed toward the top of the hill, back up through what had been her apartment. “I could at least have taught Gala it wasn’t God that took her child, but the system here. That the baby probably got sick because the sewage kept overflowing. The week before he died there was putrid slime coming down the stairs. The kids had to walk through it to go to the store and to school. That’s why her baby died. Because we weren’t yet organized enough to get the g< it to fix the sewage pipes.” She pon her voice. “She thinks it was God's will. It was her neighbor’s shit." “Gala’s baby died? You didn’t tell me.” “No, I didn’t tell you. Why should I tell such a thing?” He rubbed the top of his nose. He did that when he was afraid to say what he had to say. “Just say what you’re thinking.” ‘Tm thinking she probably would have lost the baby whether or not you’d been successful. With that many children the odds are that one is to be lost. Even in the States. Poor people’s children die.” “That’s precisely what I mean. I should have done something.” He shook his head. “You Americans are so arrogant sometimes.” In the silence that followed, she tried to compose herself. What Andreas had said had unexpectedly shamed and frightened her. She couldn’t look at him. “Who can we count on but ourselves,” Rina had once said. “You Americans all leave us anyway.” She was right. A few months after the riot, where she had sided with Caitlu 5. Caitlins tour of duty was over. On the pre-dawn boat trip across the river to Dudin, where Caitlin was to catch the train to Quito, for the first time Rina had lost her dignity. “Remain here, Caitlina,” she wept and begged. “Remain here and work with m e^ “Cait, I only meant its arrogant to think you could have changed so much in two years.” He spoke gently “I didrtl mean to be arrogant.” She could barely get the words out. “I came here to help.” He reached over and pulled her to him. “Watch Gala. Watch that nice woman carefully, and tell me how much you could closer into himself. “I love you,” he said. They sat at a table by the side windows. It was hot and very noisy, with music and laughter and talk from the stairs below. That’s the way it had always been, the constant noise. Caitlin looked across at Andreas sitting, spooning in the blood
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