and that Solange surprised no one more than herself by saying, “Yes,” and that, further, Alfonso, who each evening helped Harry return the submarine to its garage, appeared at a propitious moment, understood immediately, even though the interior of the submarine was dead silent, what had transpired and asked the two of them if they might be interested in a ride, the response to which was a muffled “All right,” from one voice, or the other, or both, Alfonso thought, as he disengaged the submarine and, with only slightly more trouble than he had had in pushing Harry by himself, rolled them first down the boulevard—the remnants of the day’s crowds parting before them with smiles and cameras cocked—and then along one gently curving street and quiet plaza after another, with here and there a splashing fountain, which transformed the sticky pavement beneath his feet, illuminated by shop windows and the occasional streetlamp, into the surface of an unnamed body of water, and that it crossed Harry’s mind, as he lay now just inches from Solange’s silver face, neither of them saying a word, their silence seeming like the first part of an understanding, that Alfonso was a kind of gondolier and the submarine a gondola and the streets watery thoroughfares, while Solange thought, we are in a submarine, protected from the terrible depths, and the lights we can see through the grill are the entrances to grottos, although of course they both thought many other things, especially when Alfonso paused for a moment before a pair of skeleton puppets, one playing a grand piano, the other a violin, the music being emitted from a gramophone standing between the two young women discretely working the marvelous puppets not anything either of them could have named, though we might as well note that it was Brahms, a jaunty piece that, being played as it was by the two little skeletons in their evening wear, seemed to color the air in the submarine an opalescent indigo that sent them both swimming off together into the depths Solange had imagined and Harry had intuited, and that, finally, Alfonso rolled the Yellow Submarine up to the gaily lit window of one of the grottos that both of them had looked upon with greatest interest and asked the two submariners if they might be interested in debarking, momentarily, in order to attend a small, convivial gathering of friends, with the understanding that he, Alfonso, would be prepared to set out again at a moment’s notice should a hasty departure seem indicated … but this is more or less what occurred, and Harry and Solange, who had begun their day on opposite sides of the boulevard, found themselves near the end of it in the company of Alfonso, enveloped in a cloud of growing familiarity that felt as freshly promising to both of them as a shower of melting snow falling against a backdrop of pure blue sky, stepping together through the doorway of a gallery opposite the city’s great cathedral—the very one where Ireneo, now on his way home to await Harry’s reappearance on the boulevard the following day, most frequently lit his candles—and into a small crowd of off-duty living statues that burst into spontaneous applause when they saw Solange, whom they hadn’t seen off the boulevard in ages, and for several minutes she was swept away into a collective embrace that gave Harry the opportunity to turn to Alfonso and thank him, and for Alfonso to bow and say, “You still owe me your story, and not just its outline,”
