The brightness coming from that room made me close my eyes, and a memory, the burst of a memory that involved my head and my grandmother’s knees blinded me to the point that I didn’t understand what I was doing there with my frozen feet standing on the earth or where so much light was coming from; how so much light suddenly existed: my grandmother caressing my hair, my head, my sleepy eyes on her oak knees, on those stone knees from whose bends sprouted green and purple varicose veins that extended all the way down her white legs, as if unraveling her body. My legs also with green varicose veins illuminated by a sun not of this world and my grandmother’s hands also rocks and pins sliding through my veins, pushing me to enter a room that didn’t fit with the rest of the cave. At first, I said the fucking Lyrica. But though it sounds implausible, that room was real. A room that belonged to another story, a space that brought another sound, that brought another smell, that wasn’t stone on stone or mud, that had hardwood floors and ceiling, and that dissolved the humidity, transforming it into a delicious vapor. A space that wasn’t the cave but the boudoir—I finally use a word I’ve always wanted to use but haven’t until now—of some forgotten or unknown princess who had a white bed, white shelves upon which rested a nativity scene with moss. Water droplets bubbled from the moss and formed real wells, not the kind made with aluminum foil in the nativity scenes where plastic ducks swim, no, these were little wells held in little containers in which tiny colorful fish were swimming. It was an infinite nativity that extended under the bed, where it seemed to continue even farther, creating an underground world. From the ceiling hung colorful threads with white pieces of paper that very well could have represented snow or perhaps stars in a frozen universe covering the whole nativity scene or room, I no longer remember. On the sides, the nativity was also infinite because it mixed in with the established collections that were collections of dolls and marbles and felted animals and perfectly organized miniature objects. An arch separated that room from what seemed to be another, but it was just the continuation of the same one. In that one, however, there weren’t many things: a canvas resting on a wooden stool, a box of paints on the floor, and a little piano, like a toy, the perfect reproduction of a real piano, a grand piano. I tried to sit down at the piano, I tried to play a note, but I was paralyzed by fear because I heard a sound and thought it was the man and knew that what I was doing was a horrible invasion, the man always had the door closed for a reason. But it wasn’t him, it was the cat furiously watching me, so I didn’t play the piano.