But now she was seven years old and didn’t want to hide, yet she was lost in her own house. No one saw her, no one was looking for her. Fulgencia had forgotten to send someone over to ask her to come play. It was Saint Cecilia’s Day, and Saint Celina must have been some unknown saint who wasn’t in the prayer books or on the calendar. Her mother was mending a plaid apron when her daughter’s name floated through the halls from the entranceway. Celinita breathed a sigh of relief—they had come to ask her to play with Fulgencia.
Celinita took off running. Fulgencia’s house was half a block away. As soon as she arrived she announced, “Today is my birthday,” and Fulgencia, climbing the stairs to get to the playroom, responded: “Let’s go to the basement, no one’s there. Is it your birthday or your saint’s day? Because if it’s your saint’s day, it doesn’t count.” Celinita didn’t know, and so she conceded to missing her birthday and accepted the loneliness of her saint’s day.
They went down to the basement: windows faced mysterious landscapes of elevator cables, trellises, feather dusters and broken bottles, trunks filled with huge hoop skirts and giant curtains. Shielded from the sky, a dark vegetation of old candelabras, woven wires, and sacks of firewood grew, like in El Tigre’s abandoned greenhouses. Between the folds of the curtains they found a doll without eyes, a doll divinely new by dint of being old, smudged by blows and discolorations, and they took turns holding her in their arms.
After the light was turned off, a firmament dark as a blackboard shrouded the basement. Two pupils shone: they belonged to the blind doll and flew around the room in search of her eyes. Fulgencia recognized her favorite doll, the one whose hair fell out from constant washing and styling, the sleepwalker of the nights when she took the elevator down to the basement and looked out the empty windows. . . .
Diorama
He tightened the final knot of his tie in front of the mirror, with the window open. Children’s voices rose from the street, merging with the sound of the waves at a distant beach. Some mornings the stench of the sea, like an outhouse, awaited them along the twists and turns of the roads, behind the houses with modern designs. The elevator descended slower than usual, and the elevator door gave rise to groans because sliding it shut only made it open again.
At the street door, that huge sign filled him with amazement—that sign with a strange name on it: Afranio Mármol, M.D. He wasn’t yet used to seeing his name displayed like a For Rent billboard. Until two months ago he was an unknown doctor without an office; now his house had become a waiting room smelling of bandages, with bronze statues, thousands of old magazines, black cushions embroidered with golden leaves and butterflies, and vases with giant tufts of flowers. He dreamed of a bright, modern office, but fate intervened: they sent him everything left in his mother’s house as if to some dumpster. And so all that shabby, unusable furniture piled up in the rooms where patients waited, shrouded in an impatient gloom, writing down their ailments. This waiting room would have scared him when he was little, like dentists’ offices. Doctors followed him throughout his childhood, doctors armed with their arsenal of thermometers, doctors who cough when they sign prescriptions, doctors who tap their fingers against bellies like drums. Now it was patients that wouldn’t leave him alone. The leaves on the trees rustling in the wind were the hands of patients crisscrossed by veins; women who passed him on the street were bright figures stripped of flesh in his anatomy textbooks, or charts depicting blue lungs with branching veins and red nervous systems marked with thin lightning bolts.