One day she starts to cry suddenly, unexpectedly, and Old Man pulls her into his lap. The physical intimacy created in that moment—sudden, spontaneous—is new for them, and makes them both uncomfortable. Still, they stay in the same position for several minutes, breathing in the same rhythm, his hands patting her hair—his first caresses—while she lets her arms rest on his legs, her head on his belly. Old Man doesn’t ask why she’s crying. A question like that is superfluous: one should be able to intuit the answer. Nor does Soon go to the trouble of giving explanations. She knows he’s not expecting them. It’s calm, there’s nothing but that calm, broken only by the song of a blue tit—that’s the only thing Old Man says: hear that?, a blue tit—and the cold air, the approaching winter, the wind a signal of menace.

I’m not afraid of dying, she says proudly. She believes in reincarnation. She’s read some books that prove it through scientific evidence. She would like to be reincarnated as a cat, but not just any cat, but a wild one, a street cat. Street cats are free, she says, and they’re beautiful, and they don’t give explanations to anyone about anything, and they spend the whole day sleeping and grooming themselves, and at night they go out looking for trouble. Old Man crosses his arms. What if he comes back as a bird? If, for example, he lived in the little body of a sparrow? She would hunt him, she’d torture him and stun him with a swipe of her cat claw, and then with the other she’d grab him by the neck and devour him in one bite! No, no, Soon sets him straight, she would recognize him right away, it doesn’t matter what body one reincarnates into because there are always vestiges of the soul that remain—that’s the correct term, according to what she’s read, vestiges of the soul. Those vestiges are revived at the right stimuli, and memories are unlocked, she affirms with certainty. In that case, says Old Man, we should have memories of our past souls, if in the past we were something different from what we are now. Soon is serious as she reflects. It’s true, she concludes, that must be it, that’s why the two of them feel close, they’ve recognized each other because in previous lives they must’ve also been very close. Maybe they were flamingos crossing the Strait of Gibraltar together, or they rowed beside Cervantes in a galley; maybe they harvested cotton side by side in Alabama, or maybe they were sibling cats in Ancient China or cows in India or a human mother and son in Siberia. She looks at Old Man sideways, dives in: could it be that they were even boyfriend and girlfriend, in other bodies and in another place, but still, boyfriend and girlfriend? Right away she bites her lips, embarrassed by her own audacity.