He offered me a ride up Del Pilar, but I told him I needed a shower and a shave.

     “Okay. Ermita. Any taxi driver knows it. Hell, it's like a shuttle service, back and forth. Ten pesos—don't let 'em charge you more. And watch out for the Aussie joints. They can get rowdy.”

     Up in my room I pulled the drapes open on the boulevard and the black void of the bay. I unpacked, holding off sleep, drew a bath, stretched out in the hot water and dozed at once. I might have laid there for hours if I hadn't heard the rap at the door. I cinched a towel around my waist, opened the door with the chain on and looked down on a straw fedora.

     “Bembo Rojas,” he said.

     I opened the door.

     “Oh!” he said when he saw the towel, the wet footprints on the carpet. “I have disturbed you.”

     “It's all right. Come in. But I can't talk for long. I'm very tired.”

     He stepped inside just far enough for me to close the door.

     “Of course you are fatigued,” he said. “The great trip from the States. How often I have dreamed of making that same journey myself. In the other direction, of course.”

     “You should. You'd have a good time over there.”

     “Perhaps some day,” he said.

     “The telephone,” I said. I got my wallet. “What, five hundred something. Five twenty-two. Am I right? That'd be about twenty-six dollars, why don't we make it thirty and call it even?”

     He was slow to go for the money. Finally he reached, took it and put it away.

     “I don't have pesos yet. I'm sorry. Dollars, is that all right?”