Manuel takes me to visit his neighbor, whom he’d heard had been assaulted. On that night he had come home bleeding, and their landlady had called the police. Manuel knocks on the door of his apartment, and we enter. The man – older, solidly built, with a suntanned face – is sitting at the kitchen table. Their apartment is in the south end of New Bedford, just blocks from the bay, and the sunlight streams through white lace curtains, across the man’s face. Sitting on the table is an enormous vase of long-stemmed red roses, made of cloth. They spill out from the vase in a great arc, like a canopy over the table.
The man’s wife is standing by the stove, which connects to the wall through a big overhead pipe. They both look at me cautiously, and then to each other, as I explain, in Spanish, what I’m trying to do. But the man doesn’t speak Spanish – only Quiché, the native language of the Mayan people. With Manuel’s help, they talk back and forth, and Manuel finally tells me that the man will think about whether he’ll share his story with me.
The next week I call Manuel, and he says he is sorry. The man is uncomfortable, and would prefer not to participate. I ask if we could visit him one more time, but Manuel says that his decision has been made, and that we should leave him alone. He tells me that he’ll be going to a birthday party there in the afternoon, for the man’s daughter. They’ll have a cake and balloons and lots of relatives around. I hang up and sit there, full of disappointment, thinking about the man and what he must be thinking. I imagine the pictures I might have made: of the children, the food, the white lace curtains and the man’s face, and the red roses on the table.