Alfred Hitchcock

Felipe learned English by watching the films of Alfred Hitchcock. He loved them to the point of having little concentration for anything else. He lived with his Colombian family in a smallish walk-up apartment, and his family soon grew tired of hearing Janet Leigh scream four times in one day, or seeing Jimmy Stewart spend a lot of time just nosily watching other people. His mother hated seeing him alone in a tiny dark room all day, staring at a screen as though hypnotized. His parents felt he should be looking for a girlfriend, or at least be curious about what was going on in the street in front of their apartment building. It was a very busy, interesting street.

But Felipe preferred to stay in his room. When he would turn the television off, he would lie in bed and write his own Hitchcock movies in his head. He never wrote these scripts down, although he had the dialogue memorized perfectly. He had twenty-three new Hitchcock movies in his head. Most of these were actually very good to great movies; that is, he matched the Master in visual ingenuity and in creating torturous suspense. There were a few places where the dialogue was flawed, but only because Felipe's mastery of the English language was not yet complete. It was never a failure of the cinematic art itself. Only two of the films were set in Colombia. Felipe was pathologically shy, and only spoke voluntarily to a few dozen strangers in his entire life, which ended at the age of twenty-three.

He had a Colombian uncle who lived with his family, who liked to make Felipe laugh by saying "Good eve-uh-ning" in Hitchcock's voice every time Felipe sat down to the dinner table.

Felipe was a cashier and bagger at a grocery store five blocks from his family's apartment. This was the second job he had had in his life.

He died suddenly on a Thursday afternoon when he was staring at the sky, wondering if it was going to snow. He was looking through the plate glass at the front of the store and wondering just that when the aneurysm at the base of his skull burst.

His coworkers were terribly upset, several of them crying, as the reality of what had just happened in front of them came clear.

It wasn't a bad life. It was a good one. Mina Rosenheim had just come down the grand staircase at the Opera and was about to query Jules Child on the matter of the child who was repeatedly seen at night crossing the Plaza below her apartment window in the film which Felipe called Disbelief when his aneurysm burst.

He was smiling at how strange her beauty was, and how perfectly she delivered the line he had written for her, which was the last thing he heard.

"Do you find that I am as attractive in the full light of day, as you told me I always am in the night?" Mina asked.