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headed into town. There was some paperwork to be filed in order to transfer Raúl’s property over to a distant cousin of ours, an unmarried woman of fifty who still lived nearby and might have some use for the house. Raúl’s children wanted nothing, refused, on principle, to be involved. My father was dreading this transfer, of course, not because he was reluctant to give up the property, but because he was afraid of how many hours this relatively simple bureaucratic chore might require. But he hadn’t taken his local celebrity into account, and of course we were received at city records with the same bright and enthusiastic palaver with which we’d been welcomed in the plaza the night before. We were taken around to greet each of the dozen municipal employees, friendly men and women of my father’s generation and older who welcomed the interruption because they quite clearly had nothing to do. It was just like evenings in the plaza, I thought, only behind desks and under fluorescent lights. Many of them claimed some vague familial connection to me, especially the older ones, and so I began calling them all
uncle
and
auntie
just to be safe. Again and again I was mistaken for Francisco—When did you get back? Where are you living now?—and I began to respond with increasingly imprecise answers, so that finally, when we’d made it inside the last office, the registrar of properties, I simply gave in to this assumption, and said, when asked: “I live in California.”
    It felt good to say it. A relief.
    The registrar was a small, very round man named Juan, with dark skin and a raspy voice. He’d been my father’s best friend in third grade, or so he claimed. My old man didn’t bother to contradict him, only smiled in such a way that I understood it to be untrue; or if not untrue exactly, then one of those statements that time had rendered unverifiable, and about which there was no longer any use debating.
    The registrar liked my answer. He loosened his tie and clapped his hands. “California! Oh, my! So what do you do there?”
    My father gave me a once-over. “Yes,” he said now. “Tell my old friend Juan what you do.”
    I thought back to all those letters my brother had written, all those stories of his I’d read and nearly memorized in my adolescence. It didn’t matter, of course; I could have told Juan any number of things: about my work as a ski instructor, or as a baggage handler, or as a bike-repair technician. I could have told him the ins and outs of Wal-Mart, about life in American small towns, about the shifting customs and mores of different regions of the vast United States. The accents, the landscapes, the winters. Anything I said at that moment would’ve worked just fine. But I went with something simple and current, guessing correctly that Juan wasn’t much interested in details. There were a few facts I knew about my brother, in spite of the years and the distance: a man named Hassan had taken him under his wing. They were in business together, selling baby formula and low-priced denim and vegetables that didn’t last more than a day. The details were arcane to me, but it was a government program, which, somehow, was making them both very rich.
    “I work with an Arab,” I said. “We have a store.”
    The registrar nodded severely, as if processing this critical information. “The Arabs are very able businessmen,” he said finally. “You must learn everything you can from this Arab.”
    “I intend to.”
    “So you can be rich!”
    “That’s the idea,” I said.
    A smile flashed across Juan’s face. “And the American girls? Ehhhhh?”
    His voice rose with this last drawn-out syllable, so that it sounded like the thrum of a small revving motor.
    I told him what he wanted to hear, in exactly the sly tone required. “They’re very
affectionate
.”
    Juan clapped again. “Wonderful! Wonderful! These young people,” he said to my father. “The whole world is right there for