There is a box between them with a screen in it, and to this day I do not know what it is for. It could be for sifting. It could be for rolling. It sat on the table in that Havana market like a piece of furniture too tired to explain itself, and the man rested his forearm on it the way men rest their forearms on things that have been useful to them for a long time, without needing to look at it. A couple of guys a few steps off were selling meat, and somewhere a radio was losing a slow fight with distance.
He was asking her something. You could see it before you could hear it, if you could have heard it at all, which I could not, standing twenty feet away with a camera and no Spanish worth the name. His eyebrows were doing the work. His mouth was doing the work. The cigarette in the corner of his lips had gone unlit and forgotten, a prop in a scene that had moved past needing it.
She had not expected the question. That was the whole of it, the thing the photograph is actually about. Above and behind them the light came down through warehouse glass gone frosted with age, softened, the hard edges sanded off. It had been falling on that table for years before either of them sat down at it. A woman’s face has a setting it returns to between thoughts, and hers had been somewhere else — the work, the heat, the cigarette she’d just lit, which she now held between two fingers like a held breath, smoke rising into that same light, catching it, going from invisible to visible to invisible again. Then he spoke, and the setting changed. Her eyes came around to him sideways, the way eyes do when the rest of the head hasn’t decided yet whether to follow. Caught. Not afraid — caught, the way you’re caught remembering something mid-sentence, or caught by a question that arrives at an angle you didn’t see coming.
They had stepped away from whatever the work was — the particular slackness of people on a break, elbows down, shoulders forward, the posture of two people who have stopped doing the thing they get paid to do and have not yet decided to start talking about anything in particular, except that he just had.
Neither of them knew I was there, and I have never quite settled how I feel about that. I took something from two people who never agreed to give it. I have made my peace with it the way photographers do, which is imperfectly, but I have not stopped thinking about it. This is the only kind of photograph worth making all the same, the kind where you are not in the room, not really, where the camera has gone as invisible as the screen on that box, recording a question and an answer that the two of them will forget by the end of the day and that I will keep for the rest of my life, lit by a window neither of them ever turned around to notice.
What they were talking about, I will never know. I have looked at this photograph for thirteen years now and I still want to know.