Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

frogs are better, says the neighbor, because they eat the mosquitos and cockroaches.
    The boy looks at him steadily.
    My dinosaur eats mosquitos and frogs. But he doesn’t eat cockroaches, he thinks they’re disgusting.
    *
    I returned to Detective Matias’s office many times. On my second visit, we had a coffee in the interrogation room while he asked me questions and I answered, convinced it was going to turn out that I was the guilty party. At that moment, looking Detective Matias in the eyes, I repented having stolen a calculator in my convent school at the age of eleven; I was assailed by the memory of the time a math teacher washed my mouth out with soap, arguing that I couldn’t go home with such a dirty tongue; all the books I’d stolen from so many libraries weighed on my conscience; the kisses I gave my girlfriend’s boyfriend; the ones I gave my girlfriend. And then there was the forged collection of poems by Owen, translated by Zvorsky.
    How many whiskies did you drink that night? he asked.
    Less than one—perhaps a half, or three-quarters of one.
    How would you describe the individual who blocked your way when you were leaving the bar?
    Medium build, not tall but not short either, darkish skin, maybe Hispanic.
    Would you like to add anything?
    No, thank you.
    Detective Matias promised to call me when the case was solved. It would take a few weeks, perhaps months.
    *
    Our neighbor is preparing his forty-first birthday party. On Sunday he buys forty-one animals in the Sonora market and sets out boxes, fish tanks, and cages in the courtyard before the astonished gazes of other neighbors arriving, slightly tipsy, from their family lunches. I watch them from the living room window. The children admire the neighbor. He’s going to liberate the animals on the day of his birthday, one animal for every year: three frogs, three turtles, two birds, thirty-two Madagascar cockroaches ( Gromphadorhina portentosa ), and a wall lizard. All the neighbors are invited to the party. He tells a story about a trip to Thailand, a Buddhist ceremony, a temple, a woman, thirty-something animals, but I’m not listening. In the middle of the courtyard, two giant cockroaches are copulating inside a fish tank.
    *
    After the loan of the Remington, Moby felt free to come to my house more and more often. He’d spend whole days there, lying in my bathtub, cooking, watering the plants, and drinking coffee with Dakota. I began to hate Moby. He smelled bad. He left horrible curly blond hairs on my soap. I started borrowing Salvatore’s armchair on the tenth floor, and returned home when I was certain Moby had left.
    *
    Yesterday my husband asked if he left hairs on the soap.
    *
    Years ago, I took a photo of Gilberto Owen. Or so I told Salvatore. It was the first time I told that lie. By now it’s an elaborate lie, repeated to myself so often that it’s come to form part of my repertory of events, indistinguishable from any other memory. Of course, I’d never seen Gilberto Owen, much less when he was young, and had certainly never taken a photo of him. But that’s what I told Salvatore, not that he believed me. I was in a Lebanese café in Calle Donceles in the historic district of Mexico City, and Owen walked past under a huge black umbrella. It was a few minutes after five in the afternoon. There had just been one of those summer rainstorms, the likes of which only fall in Mexico City and Mumbai. The sidewalks were beginning to fill again with ambulant street vendors, tourists, cockroaches, and that sad peregrination of public servants hurrying back to their cubicles, suffused with satisfaction and guilt—their shirts wrinkled, their skin glinting with grease—after a short but sweet encounter in one of the pay-by-the-hour hotels in the zone. I told all that to Salvatore and then repented it. Describing Calle Donceles that way to a foreigner has an air of literary imposture I’m now ashamed of. But Salvatore nodded, committed to my