“You should go to bed,” she announced.

“I’m not a child. You should go to bed.”

“No bunk, mister. If he gets any more cross, we’ll both be hoofing it out of here.”

“Where would we go? Hoofs can’t walk on water.”

One of the men was Mr. Morrow, the ambassador, and the other was an oil man like Enrique. According to Salomé, that second one was high-hatty, but she could make him produce the cash if she wanted to. “He’s richer than God,” she said.

“Then he must have sunrise in his pocket. And mercy in his shoes.”

She stared. “Is that from one of your books?”

“Not completely.”

“What do you mean, not completely?”

“I don’t know. It sounds like it would be in Romancero Gitano. But it isn’t.”

Her eyes grew wide. She had put her hair in a shellacked wave, hours ago, but now it was coming apart, the short curls across her forehead coming loose from the rest. She looked like a girl who had just come in from playing.

“You made that up, sunrise in his pocket and mercy in his shoes. It’s a poem.” Her eyes clear as water, the points of her hair just touching her brows. The candlelight found long, narrow lines of satin in the cloth of her dress, a pattern that would never show up in ordinary daylight. He wondered how it would be to have a mother, really. A lovely, surprised woman like this, who looked at you. At least once, every day.

“You do need another book, don’t you? To write down your poems.”

But already he was on the last page. The scene of his mother in the candlelight filled most of it, and the ending wasn’t good. When the men came back, they cranked up the Victrola, and the one called “I Could Make Him Produce the Cash” tried to dance the Charleston with Salomé, but his shoes had no mercy in them at all. You could tell they pinched his feet.

ARCHIVIST’S NOTE

These pages record the early life of Harrison William Shepherd, a citizen of the United States born in 1916 (Lychgate, Virginia), taken by his mother to Mexico at a young age. The words are those of H. W. Shepherd, vouchsafed. But the pages preceding are plainly not from the hand of a boy. He came to his powers early, that is well known and many have remarked on it, but not so young as thirteen. He did acquire a notebook that year for making a journal, a habit kept on through life. The endeavor of it has passed unexpectedly from the author to myself, and all here collected.

In January 1947 he began a memoir that was to be made of the early diaries. The pages here previous came to me from his hand, to be typed and filed as “Chapter One.” I took it for a book’s beginning. There was no call to doubt it, for he had written other books by then. He’d made what he could of that first pasteboard notebook mentioned, purchased on a dock in Isla Pixol, and probably disposed of it afterward. It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.

A few months afterward, he left off all intention of writing his memoir. Many were the reasons. One that he gave was: the next little notebook in the line had gone missing, his second boyhood diary, and he became discouraged of recalling what it contained. I believe he did remember a good deal of it, but I’ll comment no further on it. He had concerns.

There is a peculiar thing to tell about that second diary. He said he couldn’t find it, and that was a fact. It only came to light in 1954. It turned up in a trunk of his things that had been stored many years in the home of an acquaintance in Mexico City. They found it after her death caused the household to be shuffled around. The diary is leather-bound, smaller than a sandwich (approx. 3 x 5 in.), easy to overlook. It was inside a trouser pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief. So it was never kept with all his later diaries, lying there lost a long while. He never did lay eyes on it again. It had no name inside it, only a date and heading on the first page as will be shown. It was only by luck and a certain letter of instruction that the trunk was recognized as his, and sent here to me. He was of course by that time gone. Without its surprising resurrection, that missing piece of the tale, there would be none to tell. Yet here it is. The writing is his for certain, the hand, style, and heading. He wrote similar things at the start of his notebooks even when much older.

The difference in style, from the writer’s memoir to the child’s diary, the reader will shortly encounter. A man of thirty wrote the previous pages, a boy fourteen wrote the diary herein to follow. All the diaries after it show the normal progress of age. In all, he showed a habit that claimed him for life: his manner of scarcely mentioning himself. Anyone else would say in a diary, “I had this kind of a supper,” but to his mind, if supper lay on the table it had reasons of its own. He wrote as if he’d been the one to carry the camera to each and every one of his life’s events, and thus was unseen in all the pictures. Many were the reasons, again not mine to say.

The little leather-bound booklet lost and found, then, was a diary he kept from 1929 until summer of 1930, when he left Isla Pixol. That one was a toil to transcribe, the nuisance being its size: small. He penciled it in the empty portions of a household accounts book. It was evidently a common type of booklet they had in the 1920s, stolen from a housekeeper, he plainly states. He hadn’t yet the strong habit of putting a date to his entries.

The third diary runs from June 1930 until November 12, 1931. He took more faith with dating the entries after enrolling in school. That one he kept in a hardbound tablet of a type used by schoolchildren of the time, purchased in a Mexico City bookshop.

The rest follow in order, many notebooks in all, an odd lot for shape and size but all one gloss within. No man ever set a greater store in words, his own or others. I have taken pains to do the same. His penmanship was fair to good, and I was no stranger to his hand. I believe these texts to be loyal and stanch to his, apart from some small favors to a boy’s spelling and grammars. And small is the need, for a boy that took his lessons from The Mysterious Affair at Styles and so forth. I took some reliable help with translating the Spanish, which he used now and again, probably without full understanding of the difference when young. He spoke both languages as a routine. English with the mother, Spanish with most others until his return to the United States. But sometimes he twixed the two, and I’ve had to guess on some.

The common custom is to place a note such as this at a book’s beginning. Instead, I let his own Chapter One stand to the fore. He plainly meant it to be the start of a book. I stand behind the man, with ample reason in this instance. I had good years to learn the wisdom of it. My small explanations here are meant to introduce the remainder. I have set upon the whole of it certain headings, for organizing purposes. These I marked with my initials. My only hope is to be of use.