Many visitors, cousins, and older women sat watching the little girls playing, as if in a theater, but Fulgencia preferred to play only with Celinita, without toys, because she alone was crowned by the wilted halo of poverty, because she knew how to climb trees better than anybody, and because she lived in an old, unpainted house with green plants on the roof. The adults had conspired that day to make the girls cry if they didn’t play with enough enthusiasm or if they felt ashamed.

Fulgencia had imagined a different sort of party: playing in El Tigre as if the mud were snow, sculpting cupcakes with sprinkles, or making fish of dirt. Only on the Tigre Delta could this dream come true, there at the Wisteria Estate, named for the cascades of purple wisteria flowers raining down on the docks. She had been born on that estate. The house had bathrooms painted with landscapes and enormous wood-paneled bathtubs that looked like confessionals, where spiders stowed away at night. Seen through small windows of iridescent glass, water the color of an elephant from the delta looked sea-green. Often the tides held the house captive, and neither teachers nor visitors arrived on those long, sheltered days when the only figures that came to life were in her colored-pencil drawings. Shiny blue cowbirds with their mouths open wide as if playing toad-in-the-hole swam in the waters that flooded the garden. They had gone to Wisteria together just once. Usually it was the tides, sometimes the distance that made them both dread and cherish those visits to El Tigre in the winter months.

Fulgencia was the only daughter, and for that reason her parents were killing her with incessant reminders that she be careful, all of which, transformed into involuntary penitence, awakened in her perverse acts of revenge. One day she hid behind a boat that never moved from its place on the grass, bumping against a bamboo plant. She packed provisions in her pockets, lumps of sugar and Iris brand cookies. Her mother, her nanny, and the gardener all looked for her outside and in the house. Her mother cried, looking at the brown waters of the Tigre: “Where is my daughter! Where is my daughter!” Hiding behind the boat, Fulgencia heard everything. Her mother knelt in the grass wailing, imagining her daughter dead, floating among the fruits in the canals with weeds tangled in her hair. She saw her snatched by one of those traveling boatmen who passed through on Sundays; she saw her kidnapped, in a park drinking canal water and dying of typhus, with no thermometers or doctors to come to her aid.

Fulgencia gripped the boat’s oars, accomplices to her laughter that gradually faded away. She no longer dared to come back to life before the amazed eyes of her mother. Night fell with the sound of boats against the water, with the sound of crickets and oars against the water. A melancholy stench of mud, soggy plants, and fish emerged: it was the smell of the dark, resonant with catfish, perhaps, or the toads that emerged at the hour of mosquito nets. She knew that at this hour her mother was fantasizing about a distant stroll she had once taken in Venice. It was the time she talked to visitors about San Giorgio, the Ca’d’Oro, and Santa Maria dell’Orto. But Venice was sinking in the night, devoured by the black waters of the Tigre. Fulgencia cried so much she was sure she was lost or even dead; she drowned in her tears until the gardener found her amid the bamboo branches. Celinita had tried in vain to re-create the same episode in her house. Nobody looked for her. The house where she lived was too small for her to hide anywhere, and she had too many brothers and sisters for them to realize she was missing.