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of danger like an ecstasy I could inhale. Men and women ran from buildings, spilling out over the sidewalks, into the streets, their movements fluid now, so natural. Shouting and machines cracking and still I ran. The crowd thickened, blood around a wound.
    Someone shouted that the presidential palace had been taken. The radio station was in our hands. But theafternoon was still green with sunlight. This story goes round and round like the hands on a clock and you can pick it up anywhere. The sun still out, all the celebration tapered to a single cry. The bullets like a sudden terrifying rain. Blood that darkened on the steps. Faces crushed to the sidewalk. Around me, the crowd reversed suddenly. My knees hit the pavement and I lay there very still, my heart beating in my temples.
    And then a woman’s voice, slick with tears. Echeverría is dead!
    José Antonio Echeverría was so gorgeously lost, even before the last bullet found him near the grand steps. What faith these beautiful men have. To storm the dictator at noon. To declare victory while drowning in puddles of steel.
    After Echeverría, I lay awake in bed for two nights. I ate nothing but milk and sugar. Calixto found me one morning on the back steps, wrapped in a blanket, reciting quietly, Green, how I love you, green. Green gusts. Green limbs.
    The bombs went off on street corners, in schools, outside movie theaters. Everywhere I saw the crushed faces of March 13. The shadow of a bird made me remember: I had run toward the palace with the others, all of us running. And then the pigeons in the plaza suddenly rose as one, like a black veil lifting. And then the bullets, tearing into time, opening the day into another one, letting me see the other side of things. As a girl, I had thought only love could change us so completely.
    Love. Already I have used the word too often. Do you demand now that I explain myself, define what I myself never understood?
    My dear daughter, I weep to see how much I have failed you. You are lovely. I could not take my eyes off of you. And I followed you down the street until you turned and were gone. The next day I traced your steps on the cobblestone over and over again, amazed and frightened at how lightly one world rests on the next.
    When I think of my past now, it seems so far away, like India or the moon, farther almost than my future seemed to me then. And yet, when I turn my life, like a crystal, it shrinks in my hands. It fits in the space of a fist.
    Be vigilant, my daughter; memory is the first storyteller. Anyone can simulate history, it’s easy enough—there are classes of people, politicians and writers in particular, who have made it their calling. One can catalog the years, write long lists that will recall small moments. I can say Patent bedsheets “are eternal,” or Napoli socks for men, or Polvo Tres Flores (I can still see it at the corner store, red boxes piled one on top of the other), and these things mean something to those of us who lived in a particular time at a particular place. I can sing that jingle, so overlaid with meaning, “Tasty until the last drop,” and I am in the old city, passing an open window in an apartment where a man in a white T-shirt leans into a radio, adjusting the frequency, ahead of the terrible news. But these cues are open to corruption.
    Now, late at night, when I can pick up the stations from Miami, I sometimes hear the same jingle and think the ghosts are speaking to me again.
    I had long retained an odd memory from my childhood. It was neither traumatic nor happy. It was nothing, a pretty banality. But it would bubble forth unbid sometimes when I was quiet. And there I’d be: me yet a baby, turning to the lamp shade, where someone had pasted a little sticker of two purple feet. Those purple feet retained all their color in my memory throughout the years that followed. And often I found it disconcerting that I could remember that insignificant