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patience. “We may go stay in the town.”
    â€œThe town!” Helen echoed vaguely. She looked out the window. The platform was covered now with townspeople, walking idly up and down, staring in through the large windows, as if the train were some tremendous sideshow. She could see a blond pregnant woman going slowly through the crowd, little boys in twos and threes, crowding into the yellow trees, dodging under the train-wheels, running up and through the train-doors, whistling; the men, the boys with bicycles, the grave, white-haired man sitting at the station bench, the gray-haired official with a black band in hiscoat lapel; the whole town, promenading, with a strange intense sound of talk in the air. Not the relaxed gossip of fairgrounds, but breaths of danger, importance, secrecy.
    â€œThe town!” said Helen. “But what about the train?”
    The grandmother looked like a Sibyl as she sat in her corner, turning her small face up, perfectly certain, matter-of-fact. “This train,” she said, raising her hand, palm forward, the wrinkled, small palm waving from side to side, “this train isn’t going to move, anymore.”
    â€œ JUST A MINUTE ,” said Helen. “I’ll bring something back.”
    She wanted to be in the town. The crowd on the station platform was banked thick, as if it were fair-day. She saw the pregnant blonde walking in the other direction now, with a young man whose head appeared over the rest, rough black. The woman would look sidelong at the train, hardly noticing it, as if it were some public building, and continue with her peculiar sailing gait. The little boys were at the coach-windows again, appealing and beggar-faced, calling “ ¡Cigarrillos! ¡Cigarrillos! ”
    The grandmother was quiet; she knew these towns. “It’s not necessary,” she told the girl again. But Helen was already outside, behind the thick line of passengers, whose legs and rears filled the corridors like the hindquarters of domestic animals caged at a feeding-trough. They were hanging from the windows of the train, talking to the people on the near platform. On this side, the crowd was not so heavy, but there were many more guns: armed men stood in groups, smoking. The black sashes, the dark furious hair low over their foreheads, their rope sandals, their controlled silences, contrasting with the train’s conversation and acrobatics and the town’s promenading, all contributed to one effect. They took on the keepings of a secret romantic soldiery, they seemed to her, struck with the strangeness, to conceal a clue that she must have.
    The regular soldiers, in their olive and yellow, had gone. The town and the train faced each other alone.
    Once on the platform, in the broad heat, the focus changed: The men with guns were about their business, they were townspeople, they hung around, waiting beneath the row of yellow flowering trees, watching the train. From here, it was the train that was out of place, lying dead in the station. Tourists were leaning from all the windows, even up in first class.
    The engine, near the front of the station, was fuming, a gentle ineffectual line of steam ascending.
    Hurrying through the crowd, she was very afraid of being left. There were no words. How could she reach any of them without language? She turned to one of the guards, and said, in French, hesitantly, “if the train . . . leaves, will you . . . ?” She saw he did not understand, and pointed, signaling the train, town, herself, the train, the motion that would take it through the station.
    The guard laughed, and shook his hand once toward the train, disgusted. “You can go ahead,” he told her.
    Helen crossed the little concrete square behind the restrooms. The station gate was snapped open, facing a short wide street that led to the main roadway. On one side, diagonally, a row of houses presented their balconies and gardens to the station. On