Catalina played in front of the Pavilion on the Lakes. It was a marvelous pavilion where they took her when she behaved especially well, and she would enter as if it were a church, with the urge to make the sign of the cross. Inside a glass case was a blond acrobat that danced on a tightrope. You only had to insert a ten-cent coin, and the music was so irresistible that the doll began to dance; she wore a white tulle dress with sequins that quivered each time she moved. There was also a golden hen that for twenty cents laid eggs decorated with flowers, filled with sweets no one dared to eat.

When Teresa, her new friend, got to know the Pavilion on the Lakes for the first time, Catalinita too got to know it, doubly, as if for the first time again. Her eyes filled with Teresa’s amazement upon seeing the tightrope walker who danced better than ever before. Three times they made her dance until they had no more ten-cent coins left—only a twenty-cent coin remained for the golden hen. Catalinita adored Teresa’s little shoes and how her hair fell loose and straight. Teresa gave her the precious egg as a gift, and Catalinita could feel her friend’s face turning into the face of a saint. And that day they both left the Pavilion on the Lakes turning their heads to look back through the windows to the tightrope walker who had vanished forever.

The lake was enchanted in that era when the Pavilion on the Lakes existed, so enchanted that under a palm tree at the water’s edge they found a seashell or precious stone. Catalinita let out a shriek, and the two of them sat on the ground without taking their eyes from their wondrous discovery. They had forgotten the impossible happiness of boating on the lake. The water that filled the lake came, back then, from a faraway and unknown sea, like the one along the beaches of Biarritz. The water had muddied its feet on that long journey, but it hadn’t forgotten to bring precious stones or green seashells the color of the sea. Catalinita squeezed the green stone between her hands and cut her palm on its sharp edge. Little round drops of blood like ladybugs formed and landed, flattening out, on her starched white dress. She pressed the seashell against her ear and heard the sea singing.

The Sea

It was in a fishermen’s village close to the port. The hamlet of gray tin gleamed in the afternoon; a woman, placing her hand like a visor over her eyes to shield them from the sun, looked out over the empty stretch of beach. The beach in that place resembled the sea itself; it was wavy, and the transparent water reflected the changing sky. The tamarisk shrubs advanced toward the sea like slow processions of hairy green caterpillars.

The woman bit her chapped lips. The beach, as far as her eye could see, was deserted. The cowbell chimed as the dairy cows crossed the road; the white one wore the bell. The woman stopped biting her lip. Two tiny black dots appeared on the horizon and slowly got bigger: two men were arriving on foot.