And so it was many days later and many long black hours on the enormous clock in the kitchen, in the deserted hallways of the house, behind doors in rooms filled with grown-ups whispering secrets, when her mother sat her on her lap in her dressing room and told her that children did not come from Paris. She talked to her about flowers, about birds, which all became mixed up with Germaine’s horrible secrets. But the child wanted desperately to still believe that children came from Paris.

A moment later, when her mother said she’d open the window and she opened it, her mother’s face had changed completely under her feathered hat: it was a lady who came to visit the family. The window was shut tighter than before, and when her mother said that the sun was lovely, she saw the black sky of night where not a single bird sang.

The Linio Milagro Family

It was as if the night had spread blue tracing paper across the windows when the Linio Milagro family gathered around the kerosene heater in that room on the top floor. The front foyer was certainly cold, with its marble statue bearing garlands of lights; the living room with its decorative cushions was also cold, unused. The slow elevator was a sanctuary, smelling of food and surrounded by dark wooden staircases where invisible feet would climb. Those cold regions of the rooms on the ground floor were forbidden, lit only on holidays, birthdays, or unlikely weddings. For the Linio Milagro family, gathering around a kerosene heater was as indispensable as their midday lunch.

The six sisters wore different shades of green cardigans: Veronese green, emerald green, Nile green, olive green, almond-tree green and myrtle green. The six of them garnered praise for having knit the sweaters themselves. They all had the same haircut and spoke at the same time about their most recent acquisition—a hat adorned with fiberglass ribbons—until they stood up from their chairs, leaving the room empty save for the portrait of their ancestor, dressed as a hunter with a rifle in hand and a dog at his feet.

From time to time the purchase of a plot of land would unsettle the mood of this family whose only outings were to the colorful, eternally sad landscapes of movies, where blues and greens stretched across skies with yellow bell towers, embalmed in a setting sun.

Aurelia had not knitted a cardigan: she was the sister who provoked secrets, screams contained behind closed doors, awful arguments at meal times and prolonged siestas in the winter: she was the cause of dreams that arrived too late at night. Since when? Ever since the six sisters could remember. Aurelia, wearing the organdy gauze of old-fashioned lady automobile drivers, would descend the stairs at four in the morning, turn on all the lights in the living room, and play the upright piano, constantly pressing the pedals to expand the notes. Vast mysteries washed over that nocturnal music that awoke in Aurelia’s dream and on the sleepless nights of her sisters. One day, after a long family conclave where the enraged insomnia victims grew bold, the sisters decided to lock the piano up with a key. At four in the morning they heard the banging of furniture and broken glass. When they got to the living room, Aurelia was lying on the floor, her eyes closed, her hands bloodied by broken mirrors. Five terrified sisters opened the piano and deliberately lost the key under a piece of furniture. Eight silent years passed without protests about the piano.