The horizon was dotted with a ring of bungalows. They were picture-book pretty, painted blue and pink and yellow. All of them faced away from the concentric layers of the mannered world. The woman and her husband had little idea what those homes looked like from the front, whether they came with a porch or a verandah, if they faced a crowded bazaar or perched dangerously near the plunging face of a cliff.
Like snapshots through the aperture of a fairground bioscope, they had seen what they were meant to see: a kitchen and dining area at the back of every bungalow, bathed in a diffuse amber light every evening. Women coming home from work, carrying grocery, a child or maybe two to each frame.
From a distance, the husbands looked alike, as if sourced from a factory, handsome, eternally self-effacing and grateful. These were her contemporaries. Their lives were her only vista.
By the time the cleaning men left, the panorama at the rim of her existence had faded from view. The woman dimmed the lights, sat under the shadow of a bookshelf and let her sight drown in the inky blue of the lawn, drenched by a cold torrent of moonlight. And because the moon, with all that borrowed light, always made the mind wander, she went back to being a little girl, returning home with her parents from a wedding.
It is well past midnight, her tired legs pinched in a new pair of shoes, yearning for the comfort of bed. Their home is visible now. Under the slender shade of a eucalyptus-lined avenue, awed by the majestic hum of the steel furnaces in the distance, the girl asks, "Is this the most beautiful place in the world?"
Enchanted by a world drowning in moonlight, her parents forget daytime, even the spirals of ash and soot that drift from the factory chimneys to settle on furniture tops to trees in bloom to their mendacious souls, rusting everything in its prime. They agree without thinking. They say, "It is bourgeois, but it is beautiful all right."
That memory passed, leaving a lingering shadow in its wake. It struck her now that a little girl was hurrying across the lawn, her fingers firmly gripping the hands of the two adults who walked on either side. Except that they were not alone, and other people had begun flitting around noiseless and soon there was so much coming and going that it could no longer be midnight. They were such busybodies, so dynamic that no one would call them apparitions. They had more heft than shadows cast on a wall, like a toy kingdom had come to life in a happy child's head and no one else was allowed a part.
The woman pounded with her fists on the rude, inflexible glass but they would not see or hear her. All she could do was watch them in that ashen light, long-forgotten peers pretending to be grown-ups in those make-believe games of childhood while the adults, beaten by life, ran around like children.
