Thief

A dog with a smooth golden coat just walked out of a building with a piece of buttered bread in its mouth. A man and a woman stood by and laughed at the dog while I watched silently from a balcony. As it passed by me, I noticed rows of swollen nipples drooping from its underbelly. My eyes followed it about a hundred feet, until it disappeared into a gap in the wall on the far side of the road.

I looked elsewhere, but then in my periphery, the dog returned to view. Bread still locked in its teeth, it jumped atop the wall and trotted back in my direction. When it came to a gate, it paused for a tic and then jumped to the other side. From there the dog descended into a field of sugar cane across the street from where I stood.

Propped up against the wall in the corner of the field were about twenty tall bundles of sugar cane leaves. As the dog arrived, two small puppies with exactly the same golden coat emerged from the dark, protected gaps between these bundles. They followed their mother to the middle of the field, jumping at her teats and — when she threw it on the ground for them — pouncing on the piece of bread. As puppies do, they took opposite ends and nibbled at it. One would occassionally try to tug the bread away from the other, but lacking any real strength or determination to do so, they ended up dividing it pretty much equally and then laid down at their mother's side.

Love (again)

I just rode back to my town in the bed of a pickup truck. There weren't many passengers; one ancient man with glassy eyes sat on the bench across from me, and inside the cab there was a woman.

Even these few companions disembarked by the time we crested over the mountain. And so, I thought, it was just the driver and I for the ride down the hill to Fajã. But when I peered into the cab more carefully, I saw another passenger I'd missed.

The driver was an old man, no less than 60, and next to him was a young girl, no more than two. She was curled up on her side, feet toward me, head toward the engine, face toward the passenger door, and eyes shut.

The weather was cool, but the sun was bright. We drove slowly, and yet the wind still blew the hair out of my eyes, so that as we rounded each curve I could see the shift in the angle of light that filtered through the windows of the cab. Chunks of shadow and brightness rocked back and forth in lockstep across the seat, one moment shading the sleeping girl's face and then making it brilliant again.

What I loved was this: Every time the road straightened for a stretch, the old driver looked down at the little girl. If the sun was on her face, he took a hand off the wheel and held it over her eyes. Not that her eyes weren't closed — they were, and I'm sure that in her dreaming mind the blackness was total. But out of concern that she might be burned, or that she might waken too soon, or perhaps merely on the principle that a person shouldn't have sun in their eyes, he protected her.

And to think: she'll never know she was loved today.

Something I couldn't handle

It's nearly 10 in the morning when I go to the bakery to buy bread. I'm almost sure that I'm too late, but I decide to go anyway on the off chance that it may be a slow day.

I go the back way, which requires me to pass briefly through the yard of an old woman and her young son (grandson?) Helder. Sometimes the yard is empty, but when I approach, they are both standing outside. I greet them with the usual "bom dia."

Helder, being the friendly, amicable fellow that he is, asks me why he didn't see me at Carnaval in Estância Brás on Sunday. I say that, yes, I did go, but on Saturday, not Sunday. I ask him if it started earlier on Sunday. We're cool.

I walk by him and then come to face the old lady. "Tudo bom?" I offer with a smile. I stop and lean against the wall to give her a moment to respond. She doesn't... at least not to my greeting. Instead, seeing the bag in my hand, she tells me, "There's no more bread, you've come too late again."

She speaks as if I were haplessly convinced that I could still buy bread at this hour, and it's clearly clear to her that the reason I didn't come earlier is because I'm lazy.

Insulted and annoyed and angry as I am at that moment, Helder defuses the situation with his relentless positivity. "Now is the perfect time to get cookies, though," he says. "They'll be hot out of the oven."

Unfortunately, I'm still posted up against the wall, facing the old lady, who begins to inspect my long, flowy hair. I took extreme care to pull it away from my eyes before she saw me, but all the same she can't help herself. She tells Helder and I that it needs to be cut, and says I need to let her cut it.

I often get crap from her about my hair or about coming late for bread, but usually not at the same time.

Disgusted, I do something I've never done in Cape Verde: I spin around silently and walk away without looking back or saying another word. The entrance to the bakery is only 10 meters from this woman's house, but I walk past it without even checking for bread. Thrilled as I would be to buy the last three rolls just so I could throw them at her, I am indeed likely not to find any bread, and I don't dare risk that I might give her the satisfaction of seeing me walk out empty-handed.