Cogitor, Ergo Sum
The people all about her strode purposefully onward, home to their waiting someones, darting around her relative slowness like water around a rock in a stream. She could already see herself entering her building and taking the elevator where she had been mugged six months before so that she had spent all Christmas Eve, now with police, now with physicians at the Emergency Room, the center of a whirlwind of attention. Her purse had been snatched, and when she realized she didn’t have a piece of ID to her name, she grew terrified. It did not terrify her to contemplate her black eye in the mirror for days thereafter. She would observe the purple swelling on an otherwise cream-skinned perfect oval of a face innumerable times each evening. A kind of compensatory corporeal ID standing in for the paper ID she had lost. It was reassuring.
Vera was approaching the bakery. She always stopped in there after work. In the window she still saw the leaflet Mr. Zimmerman had allowed her to tape up for the local chapter of Amnesty International. It was a reminder of the tragedy of the “disappeared” of Argentina, los desaparecidos, and a call to join AI, as she had done two years earlier after reading in the paper, with mounting horror, stories of the methods that had been used by the regime to cause its critics to disappear. For her it was the awakening of social consciousness. Chapter meetings did not take place often enough and did not last long enough, as far as she was concerned. She soon became the organizational secretary and would think up, on her own, ways to increase membership and raise funds for the group’s various causes. Through AI she met a man who became a lover, too. He left the organization at about the time he left her.
Mr. Zimmerman was politely attending a crabby, wattle-cheeked woman on line before her. Vera patiently scanned the shelves of rolls and pastries under the glass counter, as if making up her mind what to buy. She kept on glancing at the baker, too, almost surprised at the solidity of his presence, the rotundity of his figure, the pleasant, owlish features under a balding, ruddy dome. He once showed her the numbers on his arm. As a boy he had escaped the ovens by a miracle. Now he presided over very different ovens. The very improbability of his existence drew her irresistibly to drop in on him whether she wanted to buy something or not. When he was through with the older woman he greeted her with a big, genuine smile, and they exchanged the usual trivial observations about the weather and the state of the world until she felt the baker growing restive under her chatter.
THE BAKER’S VIEW OF VERA
Mr. Zimmerman looked forward to Vera’s visit each evening. He liked, up to a point, her neighborly tendency to engage him in small talk. He knew that in spite of her pretense to be contemplating the whole array of his goods, she would always end up buying two hard breakfast rolls, but he never made a motion to bag them before she actually said so. Such a move, he somehow knew, would hurt her. He liked her trim figure, her modest, business-like manner of dressing, the silky waves of her dark hair that came down almost to her shoulders, and the beautiful skin of her soft-featured face. Until her divorce a few years back he had called her Mrs. Cameron, but since that time he had not known what to call her and could not bring himself to ask.
