He always wears the same suit, his fancy shoes, silk socks: it’s clothing of excellent quality—even Soon, with her basic understanding of the matter, can see that. On recent days he’s taken to putting a patterned handkerchief in his front jacket pocket, letting just a small triangle peek out, calculated, careful, and perfect. In spite of his dirty wrist and leg cuffs, Old Man clearly puts an effort into his attire and leaves nothing to chance. Now that it’s gotten cooler he’s also started wearing a coat; it’s too big for him, dark brown, with an outdated cut. This coat has been with him for the past twenty years, he tells her. Here, feel it, he says, offering his sleeve. That’s good cloth, they don’t make it like that anymore!

Beside him, Soon knows she is not elegant. To her, clothes are just a way to cover up everything she doesn’t like. She usually wears sports clothes a couple sizes too big. The changes in her body embarrass her, and she tries to hide them. She’d rather be a boy, she says. Boys aren’t always on the alert about their anatomy, no one makes comments when they go by about whether their this-or-that has grown. Although for her the worst thing is the attacks from other girls, her supposed friends—imposed by an adult conspiracy that forces them together—that cruel competition among girls to be the hottest. Soon has no problem talking about these matters with Old Man, although she’s not about to admit her real hang-ups, which don’t exactly have to do with growing, as she’s told him, but with her plainness, the zits on her arms and her marshmallow body. She didn’t know she was a marshmallow until last year, when Marga called her that in front of the other girls, and they all laughed spontaneously—without malice, so there was no point in getting mad; it was an affectionate comment, so the only possible reaction was to join in the laughter—to fake it—and then scrutinize herself in the mirror. What, exactly, does it mean to be a marshmallow? Marshmallow comes in many forms, as filling in candy bars or tiny cubes on hot chocolate. But she intuits that Marga is referring to her round face, soft and white, and her soft, plump body. Why does she feel so humiliated, so much so that she can’t bring herself to tell anyone? Marga has nicknames for everyone, always related to food in some way, and no one seems to take them to heart as much as Soon: there’s Spaghetti—Patri, who is frail; there’s Eggplant—Lola, fat and dark; Escarole—Lidia, because of her short, curly hair; Lentils—David, the redhead; Mini-Limes—Lidia, with her tiny breasts; Cuttlefish—Rubén, tall and gawky. Why is Marshmallow worse, why does it hurt so bad?

Time without Old Man drags, the hours tense, so full of minutes, and each so similar to the next. But it’s precisely the excess time that helps her differentiate nuances, observe that each moment has a specific light, a particular sound and even its own smell. There are constant changes, and they used to go unnoticed, seemingly tiny and insignificant, but now they are meaningful, even astonishing. Soon observes them meticulously, with real interest: the birth and destruction of an anthill, a new kind of insect that appears when it rains, the moss growing on the trunk of the Siberian elm—she now knows, because Old Man told her, what species it is—to extend upward like an outline on a map, transformations in the tonality and density of the grass, the variegation of the clouds and their rising speed, driven now by a colder, more constant wind. Sometimes she sinks deep into the contemplation of a tiny bit of earth, a microscopic ecosystem with minuscule fauna and minuscule flora, with hills and valleys, and she imagines herself living there, hiding there, protected and happy.