It was just that overwhelming feeling, again and more than anything else in the world, that I wanted to be writing my fiction, getting back to it as soon as I could, in this case to somehow immediately dispose of the several thousand miles and many hours of an overnight jet hissing on and on through the darkness, then a change of planes in Atlanta and finally a taxi ride on the freeway back to my place in Austin. I wanted to write as much as I had ever wanted to in my entire life, including when I was a kid taking undergraduate creative writing classes to the point that I held some kind of record at my college then for the number of them taken, dreaming of someday publishing, or even when I did get some attention and good reviews on at least one of the books I eventually went on to publish, granting the book never did sell very well—yet all of that had encouraged me, made me want to continue on with writing.
Or maybe this was so much more than anything I had known before. And right then and there I intensely wanted, now that I was indeed older and admittedly didn’t have the luxury of any full arc of a career ahead of me, to once again be sitting down at my desk in the back room in my apartment there on a stubby cul-de-sac street in Austin, Texas, to simply be writing, even if so much else in my life—the failed relationships I didn’t try hard enough to make work, a longtime job in a stifling English department in Austin where the so-called scholarly colleagues around me too often seemed like only busy careerists far removed from the genuinely important in literature, the students deserving better—true, just to be writing again seemed to be all that mattered, even if most everything else in my life, to be entirely honest about it, could at times feel as if it had never added up to very much.
I was still sitting on the bench.
“A statue of Chopin by the sea.”
I think I whispered it aloud, liking the very sound of it; I sipped from the bottle again. The water was cool, and for insulation I had wrapped the clear plastic bottle in a thick towel from the hotel before leaving, an old trick I had learned years before in traveling.
I screwed the blue cap back onto the bottle, put the bottle back in the daypack, and zipped the thing up. I got up, slipped the pack’s strap over one shoulder; I walked around the open square some more.
Two uniformed soldiers—young and smiling, from the nearby military school, most likely—were chatting with the guy who had a handcart marked PIPOCA at the far corner of the esplanade, under the limbs of a shading grove of eucalyptus trees; the cart on its bicycle wheels was a red contraption with shiny chrome trim, and the freshly popped corn itself, pipoca, lay heaped up high behind its glassed sides.
I listened a while longer to the low waves softly lapping on the sand before starting back toward the palm-lined boulevard, to finally wander through the sweet little neighborhood there directly below Pão de Açùcar, the whitewashed village of Urca proper and its maze of hilly side streets, everything impeccably groomed.
Until eventually, sure enough—and this is where it all gets stranger and even amazing, or that’s the way I see it now, anyway—three days later I somehow was back at my desk in Austin again, putting together the words that as always (somehow magically? somehow inevitably a minor miracle?) became the sentences that became the paragraphs, as I worked on a new short story that was going well, one I was feeling very good about.
Which is to say—at the desk once more and at long last, I was writing.
2009, FROM AGNI MAGAZINE, AND ALSO
THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2010
PETER LaSALLE is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the novel Mariposa’s Song and a short story collection, What I Found Out About Her. His work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, Sports Best Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Currently, he divides his time between Austin, Texas—where he is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas—and Narragansett in his native Rhode Island. He also continues to travel as much as possible to explore and write about the places where his favorite literature is set.
The City at Three P.M. Page 22
