Passing by the house not long after, they saw a sign going up that said “Property of the Academy of the Immaculate Conception,” which they read from the corner of their eyes, for fear that looking at it head-on would harm their eyesight. But Lucía saved her white dress adorned with honeycombs, the poppies from the garden surely still in its folds; there were also still the little green iron chairs, the four palm trees, and the siestas they took, stretched out in the damp rooms of the old house.

Ten years ago, Lucía Treming is in her closet, dreaming. She is wearing the white dress. She opens the windows of the house in Lomas de Zamora, and a tall young man walks through the gate: it’s Juan Pack, but they don’t know each other yet. He reaches the other side of the property without turning back, and Lucía, feeling faint, sits on one of the little green iron chairs and waits for that tall stranger to pass by again, that stranger who will lavish her with smiles for the rest of her life. Eulalia’s daughter runs around the garden with a butterfly net, ensnares Lucía’s head, and imprisons her in the dark under the net. Her fiancé calls to her from afar, unable to see her—they don’t know each other, they always see each other from afar.

Pack is dreaming in the spacious garden of his country house, where there is a freshly sprinkled tennis court without a net. He calls to the gardener, “Where is the tennis net?” “Sir, we’ve lost the net, but there is a flowering bromeliad plant behind the eighty-five-horsepower tractor.” He goes into the office, searches for the net in the desk drawers, but doesn’t find it. He checks Lucía’s room, where she is sleeping, and, opening the enormous closet, makes his way through the dresses and walks and walks. There are no dresses or ribbons or hats, but an enormous tennis net covered in cobwebs clings to his hands, endlessly unfurling—“Lucía, Lucía, we’ve lost your dresses. Your dresses have been set free and are running around the room.”

A permanent mystery resides in this closet, which Pack attempts to unravel: it’s the broom closet where as kids they would pretend to take out each other’s appendixes and play hide and seek in the dark.

Fear, nurtured and kept close, peeks out with the face of a burglar, takes him by the hand, and stares at him with the wide, adult smile of a monster.

A Strange Visit

Before, she ate her lunch at a small table in the room adjoining the dining room, and now she was allowed to have lunch at the big table. During the conversations Leonor’s eyes wandered to the windows, searching for a patch of clear blue in a sky that had been covered entirely by clouds. It was going to rain, and she’d been waiting for this day for some time, because they had promised to take her on a visit to a house in the outskirts, where they had taken her only once before. A very tall man lived there, as if isolated from the world by his height. He was a friend of Leonor’s father and lived with his daughter, two housemaids, and a gardener in a little house that had a spiral staircase. In the garden was a miniature fountain with two entwined tritons that spewed water from a spout, a palm tree flattened against the house next door, and four rosebushes in double rows on either side of the path. Elena had jet-black hair, but her face was so pale it looked almost erased; all that remained was the white bow in her hair and a dress with five pleats that caught Leonor’s eye.