There is a man with an ice cream cart who’s been coming along our streets lately. I don’t mean an ordinary ice cream van; that’s quite common; this is a man who walks up and down the lanes pushing a tiny cart with a tiny bell. I don’t live directly in the city. The houses here are set a good distance apart, green, with imported flowers and white window frames. The streets are quiet, at least by day, at least where I live. There are only the occasional sounds, birds, lawn mowers, cars now and then. And now this bell.

I have never encountered this man before, in all the hot summers of my life. He appeared in April, when it was still too mild, and has been here ever since, almost daily. You notice because the sound of the bell is so ordinary. The vans with their painted pictures blare music from a stereo. There is no music in this, more like a vendor except for the fact that the man makes no sound, doesn’t shout out; it’s only the bell, and it’s such a minute advertisement that it is actually perceptible.

I am almost always indoors when he comes around. He seems to follow a pattern most of the time, but there are days when I don’t hear the bell and it puzzles me. Him, with that little cart, up and down the streets. It can’t hold more than three dozen ice creams, the little cart. Perhaps all those steep streets are bad for his knees, the cart bad for his back. His legs mustache. How does he remember to ring the bell? And the monotony of it, the one note, the same streets, does it never strike him?

He is quite alone. Perhaps this pushing the ice cream cart is his only source of income. I have never seen anybody stop him and buy something. There is actually never anyone else around. There may be, for all I know, the same bars and sandwiches in the compartments of the cart that were there when he first came.

Something, I don’t know what it is, something about this pains me. And yet I have never once gone out of my little room when I hear the bell. I know nothing of who the man is or why he is wandering the streets near my home. I have never seen his face. I know what I ought to do, but somehow I never have any money, somehow it’s perfectly cool indoors and I don’t bother to go out, I don’t know why this happens, this not bothering, but it does, it always does.

Perhaps someday I will buy an ice cream and I will see what this man looks like, whether he is old or young. He will tell me about his life, his family, give me whatever reason he has for walking when he could drive a van, for selling ice cream even though there is nobody around, for spending his time ringing a silver bell with one tone to which nobody responds.

But I know that I won’t, and this is what pains me the most, what hollows me inside.