I noticed â¦â
He turned to me politely. He and I were, I surmised, around the same age. We each had a few silver hairs. âYes?â
âWell I was watching your dancingâI know itâs flamenco because I started a beginnerâs course not far from here, and I ⦠well I wasnât very good at it, and to tell you the truth, the teacher was a bit, well, she was a bit cruel, really ⦠I sort of lost confidence and I was wondering â¦â
âWas it Juliana?â The broken tooth made him lisp a bit. He was soft around the edges, about twenty pounds overweight. There had been no men in the class Iâd taken, no men in any of the classes in that building; not in the corridors nor the stairwells. âIt must have been Juliana.â
âJuliana de la Fuente. How did you know?â
He had a gentle voice. His hair flew up a bit at the sides. He stood in front of me holding the plastic bag rolled up at the top. It bore a green dollar-store logo. âBelieve me,â he said, âyou shouldnât take anything Juliana says to heart.â He looked past the angel and toward the street where the dance school was, between the subway station and a discount jewellery shop. âDid you notice she has a lot of students in her classes? And none of them has taken her class before. She goes through hundreds of students but not very many of them come back to her. Thatâs where I went, at first, but I didnât stay.â
âBut now you can dance. I was watching. You dance beautifully.â
âThank you. My mother was a dance teacher in Edinburgh. I learned a lot from her. Sheâs eighty-nine now. My nameâs Ben, by the way.â
I told him I had bought a pair of real shoes with the nails, and he said he couldnât afford real ones but had bought a pair of menâs Italian shoes with hard soles that clattered.
âI got them for two dollars at the nunsâ Thursday bazaar.â
I felt bad for having said I possessed real flamenco shoes.
âI find,â he said, âyou can make do with a lot of improvised things. For instance, a real flamenco hat, for men, is a very expensive black, Spanish hat. Itâs specialized, and it will be a long time before I can afford one. But today I found a substitute at the dollar-store.â He raised the plastic bag. âWould you like to see it?â
âIâd like to see you put it on.â
He took out a black straw hat with straight sides and a wide brim and modelled it for me. It transformed him.
âWow. Thatâs great.â
âIâm very pleased. I have to be careful about my spending. Have you ever seen people on the street selling the magazine LâItinéraire ?
âI think so ⦠isnât it a journal of news about street people?â
âYes. You should, if you have any change at all when these sellers ask you to buy a copy ⦠you should, I donât mean to tell you what to do, but the magazine genuinely helps them to ⦠it helps them transition from being homeless, to having a home. Myself, for instance, I just three months ago, after being homeless for years, got my own apartment because of my job selling the magazine. The next thing Iâm saving up for is some plants. I want to grow some plants in potsâI have a little balcony in the back. Iâd like to grow edible plants. Lettuces and carrots.â
He spoke, I thought, eloquently for a homeless person. He hadnât shaved in a few days but he had that eighty-nine-year-old mother whoâd taught him to dance, and he had a desire to grow his own vegetables in pots â¦
âYou donât seem,â I ventured, âlike a person who has always been homeless, or who has been homeless for most of your life â¦â
âNo,â he said. âI had a home. A lot of us had homes. A lot of people who sell the magazine had everything. But something happened that made us