There were millions of silk cushions with tassels that rang like little bells each time someone entered. There was one woman much taller than the others, with a yellow tarlatan dress embellished with caramel-colored stalactites, and they all had short hair and long tresses hanging under their skirts that were raised like stage curtains. They spoke with the voices of mermaids.

He had permission to sing in all the theaters, and one day he sang in the hair salon, but he couldn’t stoop to sing in a hair salon. The guitar was too tall, one had to climb up a staircase of guitar strings to reach the notes, and now all the women in that fire-colored house were chasing him. All the women in the rooms called him to sing in a theater full of red drapes.

Finally he entered a room covered in vines and flowers with unraveling ribbons; the bed was black wood inlaid with shining green and orange baubles; there was a single chair that moved around the room as soon as someone wanted to sit down.

The woman dressed in yellow tarlatan hugged him.

Tarlatan, tarlatan, tarlatan
the mermaids sang . . .

Looking up at the ceiling filled with people watching him, he saw his top hat lit up like a clock in the darkness of the room, and he fled through the hallways with his arms in the shape of screams.

The Poorly Made Portrait

The little boys must have liked sitting on Eponina’s ample lap because she wore skirts and dresses like chairs with round arms. But Eponina, enfolded in the black waters of her moiré dress, was distant and mysterious; one half of her face seemed erased, but she maintained the somber movements of a miniature statue. The children almost never sat on her lap because her knees would evaporate and her reluctant arms frequently let them fall off.

She hated children, had hated her sons one by one as they were born, thieves who had stolen her adolescence and who were never imprisoned, except by the arms that rocked them to sleep. The arms of Ana, the servant, were like cradles for her mischievous sons.

Life was long and tiring, with too much time to rest; life was many ladies chatting without listening to one another in the drawing rooms of houses where everyone waits for parties from one evening to the next as a kind of relief. And so, by dint of living with the bearing of a poorly made portrait, the impatient Eponina grew patient and constricted, just like the paper roses that grow under parlor domes.

The maid distracted her by singing in the morning when she was tidying up the bedrooms. Ana’s eyes were wide and sleepy above a very awake body; in her constant activity, she moved in circles as if in a trance. She was always the first one up and the last to go to bed. She was the one who distributed breakfasts and clean laundry throughout the house, who doled out the jam, the one who made and turned down the beds and who served the meals.