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listened. The maps were cracked along the creases and edges, becoming closer to dust with every passing day.
    “How is the fighting today?” I asked. “Is your side winning?”
    “The good side does not always win,” he said.
    “Do you wish you were there?”
    “In the war, an old man like me?”
    Above Papi’s head loomed a large portrait of the Generalissimo, which Señora Valencia had painted at her husband’s request. Her painting was a vast improvement on many of the Generalissimo’s public photographs. She had made him a giant in full military regalia, with vast fringed epaulets and clusters of medals aligned in neat rows under the saffron braiding across his chest. Behind him was the country’s red and blue flag with the white cross in the middle, along with the coat of arms and the shield: D IOS , P ATRIA , L IBERTAD . G OD , C OUNTRY , L IBERTY . But the centerpiece was the Generalissimo himself, the stately expression on his oval face, his head of thick black hair (the beginning of gray streaks carefully omitted), his full vibrant locks swept back in gentle waves to frame the wide forehead, his coy gentle smile, and his eyes, which seemed oddly tender. Bedroom eyes, many had called them.
    Papi seemed unaware of the Generalissimo’s enormous presence as he listened for word from much farther away.
    “Would you like some hot guanabana tea?” I asked. “Good for sleep.”
    He shook his head no.
    “Amabelle, I am not a lucky man,” he declared.
    “Why do you say that?” I asked.
    “I think we killed a man tonight,” he said.
    Then it seemed to me that the dead man was even less lucky than he.
    “On the day my grandchildren are born, I was in an automobile that may have taken a man’s life,” Papi said. “My son-in-law did not want to stay and search, and I did not force him to do it. It was already dark. I didn’t make myself or Luis go down into the ravine to look for the man, to see if we could save his life. You will tell me, Amabelle, if you hear of this man, if you hear that he lived or died. You will ask your friends and then report to me.”
    “I will.”
    “Good-night, then.”
    “Good sleep, Papi.”
    Outside, Luis skinned and chopped up the dead goat. He piled the legs in a bucket and covered them with clumps of rock salt.
    When I was a child, my father and I used to play a game called osle using the small front-leg joint bones from a goat. These bones are like dominoes, except they have a curved back and three hollowed sides. I’d spent hours alone trying to get a handful of five to land on the same side. I never succeeded.
    I asked Luis to cut off the two small bones for me. Wiping off the blood, I took them to my room. There I undressed, taking off my sand-colored housedress and the matching faded square of cloth wrapped around my head. Nearly everything I had was something Señora Valencia had once owned and no longer wanted. Everything except Sebastien.
    I spread an old sheet on the floor next to a castor oil lamp and a conch shell that Sebastien had given me, saying that in there flowed the sound fishes hear when they swim deep inside the ocean’s caves. On the wall was pasted a seven-year-old calendar, from the year of the great hurricane that had plundered the whole island, a time when so many houses were flattened and so many people were killed that the Generalissimo himself had marched through the windswept streets of the Dominican capital and ordered that the corpses he encountered during his inspection be brought to the Plaza Colombina and torched in public bonfires that burned for days, filling the air with so much ash that everyone walked with their eyes streaming, their handkerchiefs pressed against their noses, and their parasols held close to their heads.
    I lay on my mat on the floor, giving Sebastien time to arrive. If he didn’t come soon then I would have to go and look for him in the compound at the mill.
    In the meantime, I did something I always did at