She found herself in the Anchor haberdashery, buying hairpins to keep her long thin braids wrapped around her head. She liked the shop windows of haberdasheries for a certain delectable atmosphere, with their rows of candy-colored buttons, and sewing kits in the shape of candy boxes with paper lace. The hairpins had to be golden. Her last pupil, who had been crazy about hairdos, had begged to do her hair one day when, recovering from a cold, she wasn’t allowed to go out for a walk. Miss Hilton had given in because there was no one at home: she had let her hair be styled by the hands of her fourteen-year-old pupil, and from that day on she had adopted those braids that made her, seen from the front with her own eyes, into a Greek statue. But seen from the back with the eyes of others, it was a jumble of loose hairs falling like rain over her wrinkled neck. From that day on, several painters had looked at her persistently, and one of them had asked permission to do her portrait, because of her extraordinary resemblance to Miss Edith Cavell. On the days when she was going to pose for the painter, Miss Hilton wore a dress of olive green velvet, heavy as the upholstery of an ancient prie-dieu. The painter’s studio was hazy with smoke, but Miss Hilton’s straw hat carried her to infinite sunny regions near the outskirts of Bombay.

On the walls hung paintings of naked women, but she liked the landscapes with sunsets, and one afternoon she took her pupil to show her a painting where you could see a flock of sheep under a tree gilded by the setting sun. Miss Hilton looked around desperately for the painting, while the two of them waited for the painter. There was no landscape; all the paintings had turned into naked women, and it was a naked woman who wore the beautiful braided hairdo in a recent painting on an easel. Before her pupil that day, Miss Hilton posed more stiffly than ever, against the window, draped in her velvet dress.

The next morning when she went to her pupil’s house, no one was there. On the table in the study, an envelope awaited her with the money for half the month and with a little card that said in large, indignant letters, written by the lady of the house: “We don’t want teachers with so little modesty.” Miss Hilton didn’t quite understand the meaning of the sentence; in her head the word modesty was swimming around, dressed in olive green velvet. She sensed a femme fatale growing inside her, and she left the house with her face flushed, as if she had just played a game of tennis.

Opening her purse to pay for the hairpins, she found the insulting card that still peeked out from among the papers, and she looked at it furtively as if it were a pornographic photograph.

The Backwater

The Backwater Ranch was four hours away by train, to the west of Buenos Aires. The country was so flat that the horizon climbed up the sky on all four sides, in the shape of a bathroom sink. Chinaberry trees flourished on the grasslands, plum-colored in the summer and golden in autumn; the cries of strange birds floated on a lagoon; there were clusters of casuarina trees that seemed like recent arrivals from a journey by train, with their pine needles still harboring a pure sound, soaked in the sea. There was a predictable avenue of eucalyptus trees going up to the house: here it was possible to see the horizon from all sides except one, and that side of the house wasn’t where the sun would rise or set. A veranda wrapped around the house, reflecting the bright sunsets; from there you could hear the mooing of the ranch’s cows.