Libia and Cándida had filled their prayer books with pictures of their friends. They felt adrift because they couldn’t choose a favorite friend, for fear the others would be resentful. They spent their winters on the empty estate, awaiting letters that were promised but never arrived. And as they grew, the sun-colored bond of affection that held them together during the summers diminished imperceptibly. The dresses handed down to them grew tight, and there was no longer a hem to lower or a sleeve to lengthen. When the family wasn’t around, Libia and Cándida entered the big house like intruders, to look at themselves in the full-length mirrors. Usually they could only see themselves in a cracked mirror, with distorted eyes and swollen lips, their dresses always in shadow, but in the big house they’d open the shutters and stand there to adore themselves, imagining they were seeing the young ladies of the house in those mirrors.

One day Cándida came so close to the mirror that she gave herself a kiss, but when she felt the smooth cold surface where kisses could not penetrate she realized that her girlfriends were all abandoning her in the same way. The love they had previously sent her, sometimes in a postcard, they now sent as clothes; when they were around, they could spare only a frozen smile. No longer were there words or actions, except perhaps the embrace of empty sleeves of the dresses that arrived, packaged as gifts. Cándida recoiled from her image with her eyes fixed on the mirror, and in that pathetic flight from herself she thought she saw a distant resemblance to a movie star she had seen in a film once, where the heroine escaped from her house.

Summer came, winter came, and summer returned: they were grown-ups now, and the owners of the estate barely managed to remember to take them to church. They grew to hate more and more their contented father and enraged mother.

Venancio Medina increasingly assumed the role of owner of the ranch. When he’d go to the station to pick up visitors, and these travelers would exclaim in admiration, he’d shake his head and say with modesty: “It’s not that nice, not at all! There are much nicer ranches than this one!”

Venancio’s daughters thought that no ranch could be nice. They hated the quiet song of the doves at midday, they hated the sunsets that left dirty fruit-colored stains in the sky, and they especially hated all the human horrors, the silence. Libia married the first man who offered to take her away to live with him near a paved road. They spent all their savings on furniture that didn’t fit in a house that was too small, where she lived cramped in with newborn babies, soiled furniture, embroidered rugs, and cushions, and where she never had any time to sit down and rest.

That same day Cándida, without any goodbye to her parents, took a train to Buenos Aires, carrying with her a bundle of dresses with the empty sleeves of her friends.