I have no recollection of the evenings, save those autumn nights that have left their imprint, so much so that they block out all the rest. The gardens and houses looked as if a move were underway; invisible trunks seemed to float on the breeze, and white sheets had already begun to shroud the dark wood furniture inside. Only the poorest houses were spared those winter farewells. On those cool afternoons when I was a girl, they would send me to buy rice, sugar, or salt, and the last yellow rays of sunlight—the same dusky yellow I see now—would cloak the trees of Sarandí Street. My hands were clenched tightly around the leaves I had pulled from the fences along the way, for fear of dropping something. After a while I came to believe I carried a mysterious message, a fortune in that crumpled leaf, which, in the warmth of my hand, smelled of summer grass. In the middle of my walk from our house to the market, a man would appear. He was always in shirtsleeves, hissing catcalls at me, chasing after my bare legs with the willow branch he’d use to swat mosquitoes. That man was a fixture of those houses, always there, like an iron gate or a staircase. Sometimes I’d take another, longer way that followed the river’s edge, but all too often the rising waters would prevent me from passing and I’d have to take the direct route. I had six sisters then. Some married and moved away, others were dying of strange diseases. After living bedridden for months on end they would emerge, their bodies withered away and covered in deep blue bruises, as if they had endured long journeys through thorny forests. My health filled me with obligations to them and to the house.

Waves carried on the wind shook the trees of Sarandí Street. The man leaned out of his front door, hiding an invisible knife in his twisted face, and I smiled from terror as it slowly drew me closer, as if in a nightmare, to the walkway leading up to his house.

One afternoon, darker and deeper into winter than the others, the man was no longer outside. A voice sounded from one of the windows, muffled by distance, pursuing me. I didn’t turn around but I felt someone running after me who grabbed my neck, directing my paralyzed steps into a house shrouded in smoke and gray cobwebs. At the center of the room stood a cast-iron bed and an alarm clock that read half past five. The man was behind me, the shadow he cast on the floor growing larger and larger until it reached the ceiling, ending in a small round head wrapped in cobwebs. I didn’t want to see anymore, so I shut myself up in the dark little room of my hands until the alarm clock rang. The hours had tiptoed by. The faint breath of sleep invaded the silence. Around the kerosene lamp fell slow drops of dead butterflies, and through the windows of my fingers I saw the stillness of the room and a wide, untied pair of shoes on the edge of the bed. I still had to face the horror of crossing the street. I took off running, letting my hands fall away from my face, knocking over a wicker chair the color of daybreak as I went. Nobody heard me.