Ripper by Isabel Allende Page B

girl with green eyes and her little brother, the children he should have rescued from the dugout, carefully shielding them with his arms so that they would not see what had happened. He wrapped Amanda up in his leather jacket and held her up as they cut through the garden, collecting the backpack she had left under one of the bushes, and headed back to his truck, where they waited for Pedro Alarcón to lock up the house.
    Amanda was choked with tears, and with a cold that had been brewing for some days before viciously flaring up that night. Ryan and Alarcón thought she was in no fit state to go back to school, but when she insisted, they stopped by a drugstore, where they bought a cold remedy and rubbing alcohol to remove the fluorescent paint from her arms. They stopped for breakfast at the only café they could find open—linoleum floor, plastic chairs and tables. The room was warm, and the air was filled with the delicious smell of fried bacon. The only other customers were four men wearing overalls and hard hats. A girl with hair gelled into porcupine spikes, blue nail polish, and a sleepy expression took their order, looking as though this was the end of an all-night shift.
    While they waited for their food, Amanda made her saviors promise they would not say a word to anyone about what had happened. She, master of Ripper, expert in defeating evildoers and plotting dangerous adventures, had spent the night in a packing crate, a mass of snot and tears. With a couple of aspirin, a cup of hot chocolate, and a stack of pancakes and syrup in front of her, the escapade she recounted to them sounded pathetic, but Ryan and Alarcón did not make fun or scold her. The former methodically tucked into his eggs and sausage, while the latter buried his nose in a cup of coffee—a poor substitute for maté—to hide his smile.
    “Where are you from?” Amanda asked Alarcón.
    “From here.”
    “You sound foreign.”
    “He’s from Uruguay,” Ryan interrupted.
    “A tiny little country in South America,” Alarcón explained.
    “This semester I have to do a project on a country for my social justice class. Do you mind if I use yours?”
    “I’d be honored, but you’d be better off picking somewhere in Africa or Asia—nothing ever happens in Uruguay.”
    “That’s why I want to use it—it’ll be easy. For part of the presentation, I have to interview someone from the country I’ve chosen, probably on video. Would that be okay?”
    They swapped phone numbers and e-mail addresses and agreed to meet up in late February or early March to film the interview. At seven thirty that miserable morning, the two men dropped the girl off in front of the gates of her school. She said good-bye, shyly kissing each of them on the cheek, hiked her backpack onto her shoulder, and walked away, head down, dragging her feet.

Monday, 9
    A lan Keller’s best-kept secret was that from a young age he had suffered from erectile dysfunction, a constant humiliation that made him avoid intimacy with women he found attractive, for fear of failing, and with prostitutes, because the experience left him depressed and angry. He and his psychoanalyst had spent years discussing the Oedipus complex until they were both thoroughly bored and moved on to other subjects. To compensate, he set himself the task of gaining an exhaustive knowledge of feminine sensuality, the things they should have taught at school if, as he liked to put it, the educational system dealt less with the reproduction of fruit flies and more with human sexuality. He learned ways of making love without having to rely on his erection, skillfully making up for what he lacked in potency. Later, by which time he had already developed a reputation as a ladies’ man, Viagra came along, and the problem ceased to torment him. He was on the point of turning fifty when Indiana blew into his life like a spring gale, ready to sweep away any trace of insecurity. He dated her for several weeks, never