A Pastry Shop and a Bookstore

"Perdon," she said abruptly.

"Lo siento. I was only looking--"

She gave him a snooty expression and moved away from the display case.

Chocolate pies were laid out on a silver platter. Bemused salesgirls in white aprons walked around offering samples of miniature pastries. And the older Spanish wives mostly cheating on their husbands this afternoon watched the shiny casements with a kind of inappropriate quiver. The pastries looked more like works of art than edible foodstuffs. The women had bronze highlights in their hair and deep red lipstick, lipstick they never wore for their husbands. Colorful jellies oozed out of puffy morsels and rich glazes dripped onto white doilies. And how many of these women really had lovers? Maybe three or four. The rest preferred almond cake, brandy truffles, flan, tiramisu, and crème-filled rolls.

Lethe meandered from the pastry shop to a bookstore down the lane.

Lemon-scented air. Lethe awoke from his dreams of seducing the women in the pastry shop. The bookstore was like the den where his father retreated to; it was cloistered and dry, it smelled of leather and wood. Lethe felt a nostalgia for home even though home was the last place he wanted to be.

He climbed a small ladder to get to the top where he contorted his body and balanced on a plank of wood. It was a challenging position. Scanning the titles from Dickens to Dostoevsky, Lethe realized that most of the books were in Spanish. The Senora had recommended Don Quixote a couple weeks ago and had told him to read it in Spanish. Now was his chance. He reached for the holy grail of literature . . .

The fall caused a great clap on the floor and to top it all off, the book whacked our hero good, drawing attention from the entire room, the shopkeeper included. Words were shouted and exchanged; words meant to be compassionate.

A hoard of beguiling faces peered into his eyes, studying him, asking all sorts of questions in Spanish. Next to the crowd, the shopkeeper cradled the enormous tome, Don Quixote. With a sullen and aggrieved expression, it looked like he wanted to charge Lethe for damaging the corners of the book. That's why he had put it on the top level, to keep it from the hands of dangerous American tourists.