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subsidiary instance, been searching or hadn’t he? could he, in other words, fairly attribute a portion of his boorish behavior in front of the angel to his astonishment at having found—rather than stumbled across—her? and what (the fuck, he thought) was the difference? it was hard to say, which was the way so many of his arguments with himself ended: in depressing stalemates, he far and away preferred losing to himself, as at least in those instances he achieved some approximation of clarity, and clarity, even the false variety, was inarguably something, etc., Harry thought, and as he did so, moving all the way down the long avenue and toward the water, the handsome woman, the woman with paint on her face, the silver angel—whose name, it is time for her to have one, was Solange—stood on her box, and thought not about Harry, whom she had barely noticed and had quickly forgotten, but about a path lit by star- and moonlight, one she had heard the dead were obliged to travel before leaving this sphere, and that for some was very long and for others very short, and she wanted to know which, in the case of her lost one, it was, and not knowing was troubling her and preventing her, and her lost one, she suspected, from moving on, which was why when, a week ago, after she had found the little salmon-colored slip of paper on the subway platform that guaranteed answers to “insoluble questions,” she had telephoned the number given and had been told to wait at the café where we first encountered her and where Ireneo made his mistake.

F or his part, Ireneo, who had quickly shrugged off any sense of guilt about having brought Harry along to the “answer session” at his employer’s apartment, due to the inherent, not to mention typical, vagaries of his brief—“Bring me the one with the broken face”—had in fact been tasked with finding the woman, but quickly realizing what to Harry would seem so problematic—that only serendipity would bring him back into contact with her, who in arranging to be present at the café at the given hour had communicated neither name nor number—he had done exactly nothing besides keep his turquoise eyes open as he went about his business, which in the vicinity of the moment we have lately been considering, had him lighting candles for the dead at a church no more than a quarter mile away from where Solange stood unhappy, unmoving, on her silver box, and less than that from the living tree statues that Harry passed on his way down the boulevard, a relative proximity that all three of them, had they known, would in the light of their later association have found bracing, Ireneo no less than Harry and Solange, still, what is most pertinent at the moment is that among the seventeen red candles Ireneo had been tasked with lighting by his employer Doña Eulalia—the old woman who had spoken to Harry while intending to speak to Solange—three related to the former and one to the latter, and as soon as they were lit, this very Doña Eulalia, who was sitting quite some distance away on a small red sofa by the window of her bedroom, felt a sharp urge to sit up straight and take a deep breath and insert a mint-lemon drop into her mouth, only the last of which she did, while thinking, “I should have spoken to him while he was here, and now where is he, and more importantly, who are
they?
for even though
something
had come across authoritatively enough to her in the days following Harry’s unexpected appearance for her to expand the list of souls she was actively tracking, she didn’t know who the candles that corresponded to Harry were, any more than she knew who the single candle was that corresponded to Solange, though there were things of course that she could say about them: saying things, however imprecise, about the souls corresponding to the candles she was forever sending Ireneo off to light was her business, though there were times—like now as she sat on the sofa sucking on her