When Cecilia left at five that afternoon, walking alone through the woods, Elena ran to her mother’s room and said, “Cecilia has tuberculosis.” Suddenly a fence sprang up around her, and now that the news had reached her mother’s ears, she was trapped.

From that day on she was hidden behind closed doors, listening to voices grow, fade, and vanish into other rooms: “It’s dangerous,” they’d say. “Cecilia won’t be coming to this house anymore.” That’s how they separated her from Cecilia, gradually, indirectly, from behind closed doors. The summer days passed with the heaviness of a soft, sweaty hand, and with the humming of mosquitoes as thin as pins. During siesta she would watch the sleeping garden through the slits in the shutters. The cicadas sang starry songs that echoed in her ears like the red stains that flooded her vision after she stared at the sun too long. She watched Cecilia enter through the garden gate, gathering acorns: they resembled tiny pipes that, pretending to smoke, they used to pass back and forth like men sipping maté. She felt that Cecilia was gathering them for her, those smooth green acorns that concealed an almond-white flesh. After looking steadily up at the shutters, as if willing them to be transparent as glass, Cecilia would run toward the door and ring the bell. Someone would answer the door and say words Elena couldn’t hear. They’d give her sweets or toys before shutting the door, telling her that Elena wasn’t home, that Elena had a headache or a cold. But each day she would return, gather acorns, and stare up at the closed shutters behind which her friend’s eyes caught a glimpse of her. Until the day she never came back.

Elena was behind the shutters at siesta hour. The gardener was dressed in black. Now Elena ran from the secrets spoken behind closed doors. She ran through the halls, screaming loudly so as not to hear the secrets, singing loudly, banging chairs and tables in every room she entered. But nothing mattered. Beyond the clatter of tables and chairs, beyond her songs and screams, Cecilia had died. Cecilia had caught a cold running barefoot along the river’s edge two weeks before and had died.

Elena saved the glass from which they drank the forbidden water.