Only one house on the street had no lawn before it. It squatted low and square upon the sidewalk with a heavy iron grating supporting a glass facade. That was Bartoli's shop. Above it, from a second story showroom, wooden angels surveyed the neighborhood. Did the Old Man remember them there?

Yet everywhere else sameness was stucco and wood in square blocks -- like fortresses perched against the slant of the hill, rising with the hill to the top where the church was and beyond that to the cemetery. Only paved alleyways tunneled through the walls of those fortresses into the mysterious core of intimacy behind the houses where backyards owned no fences, where one man's property blended with the next to form courtyards in which no one knew privacy. Love and hatred and fear were one here, shaded only by fig trees and grape vines. And the forked tongue of gossip licked its sinister way from back porch to back porch.

The Old Man silently fed upon these streets. They kept him alive, waiting. Waiting for what and for whom, only he could tell and would not. It was as though he had made a pact with the devil himself, but it was not yet time to pay the price. He was holding out for something. He was determined to hold out.

The Old Man's son threw himself down, belly first, upon a concrete step, taking in the coolness of it, and dreaming of the day he would be rich. At fifteen he didn't care that he had no mother, that he couldn't remember her face or her touch; neither did he care that Aunt Rose provided for him.