Snow lived with a woman of Mayan heritage, a leftist teaching assistant at San Carlos University by the name of Expectación (his memoir was entitled He Lives With Expectation), who made her home in Barrio Villareal, a working class neighborhood in process of decaying into a slum. When not on the job, his two preferred activities were having sex with Ex (his lover’s nickname) and smoking heroin, the latter serving to cut into the frequency of the former. Evenings he would sit on his stoop, high, shirtless, and shoeless, scuffing up dirt with his toes, studying the stars that emerged from a pall of pollution above the low tile roofs, and taking in the pedestrian parade: shop girls scurrying home with their eyes lowered and bundles clutched to their breasts; short, wiry workmen who carried machetes and nodded politely in passing; dwarfish, raggedy street kids holding paper sacks with soggy bottoms drifting along in small, disheveled packs – on occasion, sensing a kindred spirit, they would hover beside Snow’s stoop, gazing up toward the rooftops and tracking things he could not see. One evening as he sat there, joined on his watch by a wizened-looking kid who could have been ten but was likely fifteen and, except for stringy, dark hair, resembled a tiny old man in grungy shorts and a faded Disneyworld T-shirt . . . one evening, then, he spotted a teenage girl approaching through the purpling air. Slender, leggy, pale. Black curls cascaded down over her shoulders, an opulent architecture of hair at odds with her overall Goth-punk aesthetic: black jeans, black kicks, and a long-sleeved black turtleneck. Black fingernails, too. Heavy make-up. She walked with an unhurried step, yet her movements were crisp and purposeful, and she had about her such an aura of energy, it seemed to Snow that he was watching the approach of a small storm. He pictured a funnel cloud of dirt and masonry chunks flying up in her wake, an image that prompted him to grin goofily at her as she came alongside them. She did not seek to avoid his scrutiny, but stopped in front of the stoop and gave an upward jerk of her head that spoke to him, saying, You got something on your mind? Spit it out.
‘Buenas noches,’ said Snow.
The kid stuck his face into his paper sack and huffed furiously, and the girl asked him in Spanish, ‘Who is this asshole?’
‘He lives here,’ said the kid groggily.
‘I speak Spanish,’ Snow said. ‘You can talk to me.’
The girl ignored him and asked the kid why he hung out with this pichicatero. The kid shrugged.
‘Pichicatero? What’s that?’ Snow asked the kid.
‘A fucking drug addict,’ said the girl in lightly accented English.
‘He’s the addict.’ Snow gestured at the kid. ‘For me it’s just a hobby.’
With its mask of mascara and bloody lip gloss, her face was trashy, beautified not beautiful, yet once he had wiped away the make-up with a mental cloth, he realized the basic materials were quality. A casual observer would perhaps have judged the face too bland, too standard in its perfection, like a schoolboy’s rendering of his favorite teenage angel vampire slut, but to Snow, a connoisseur, it was exuberantly and idiosyncratically feminine, a raptor’s purity of purpose implied by the way her lips curved above a slight overbite, the delicate molding of the tiny, tapered chin, and beside the nose flare of a nostril, the necessary flaw, a pink irregularity, a scar that, had it been treated properly, would have required but a stitch or two to close. Her skin seemed to carry a faint luminosity. Her irises and eyebrows were such a negative color they might have been cutaways in her flesh that permitted a lightless background to show through. She was, Snow decided, scary beautiful.
‘Dirty feet,’ she said to him. ‘Dirty fingernails. Dirty hair.’ She gave him a quick once-over. ‘Dirty heart.’
Though too stoned to be offended, Snow felt that he should offer an objection and said mildly, ‘Hey. Watch your mouth.’
She switched to Spanish and addressed the kid. ‘Be careful! You don’t want to wind up a shriveled soul like him.’
‘Bet you used to be an emo girl,’ said Snow. ‘Then you hooked up with some Goth guy and crossed over to the dark side.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Come see me and I’ll introduce you to him. He loves to meet new people.’
‘Sure thing. Give me your address.’
Her face emptied and her eyes lost focus, as if she were hearkening to an inner voice. She was silent for so long, Snow waggled a hand in her face and said, ‘Hello!’
She turned abruptly and strode off without another word – a man passing in the street gave her a wide berth.
‘That was weird,’ Snow said.
‘Yara.’ The kid fingered a tube of glue out of his pocket and began squeezing it into the paper sack.
Snow said, ‘What?’
‘Her name is Yara. She’s crazy.’
‘How’s that make her different from anyone else?’
