When dinner was over, the voices grew louder over dessert with the usual sounds of crunchy meringues.

Everyone went to bed early that night.

In their dreams the most faraway hours were close by, and they walked embracing one another. Before their eyes had even closed they heard Aurelia at the piano. No they didn’t. The night was silent. A strange smell of burned paper entered the rooms, wrapped in the silence of fire. The house filled with black smoke.

The entire family leapt from their beds and rushed to grab coats, pants, and shoes from the closets. It was four in the morning: Aurelia was moving toward the piano, and they had to drag her to the street door. The flames grew, the neighbors called the fire department. Everyone peered from windows to see the fire, but Aurelia’s eyes were dreamily swimming up remote streams of music.

The Linio Milagro family, huddled on a street corner, watched the frightening flames. Nobody realized that Aurelia was missing. The flames climbed steadily to lick the sky as the walls crumbled to the ground. Suddenly they heard the piano, the same music as always, serene in the night. “Aurelia! Aurelia!”

The house was old and insured, and no one had ever wanted to rent it. The timid hope of an opportune fire occurred to them. “Aurelia! Aurelia!” Aurelia was nowhere to be found, only the piano could be heard, fading away as the fire grew.

Aurelia was not saved from the fire. Shrouded in the organdy gauze of an old-fashioned lady automobile driver, she died like Joan of Arc, hearing voices. The Linio Milagro family, pursued by the piano at four in the morning, would keep changing houses over and over and over again.

Bare Feet

Those arguments served up like yesterday’s cold cuts are the worst, tying us to a malaise of double knots, impossible to undo. They have the gummy consistency of poultices, thought Cristian Navedo as he made the disorder of his desk even worse, piling on books and new papers whose presence added to the mountain range that grew incessantly on the table. He had the constant fear of dying asphyxiated under the papers, lost forever in that disorder, the papers one looks for and never finds, because they are swimming in an indistinguishable stack of other papers behind the bookshelves, tangled forever in the shadows of dirt- and dust-covered corners. And yet as a child he had been taught to be organized, to fold his clothes over a chair before going to bed, to store notebooks and pencils in the desk drawer, and more than once he was denied dessert. But all that had only made him messier, serving only to teach him to organize his disorder industriously.

Cristian kept everything, even some of his childhood notebooks, yet he lived in a state of perpetual anxiety of having lost everything. Behind that undisciplined regiment of things was a dense thicket of an entire life that reached unfathomable depths. He kept everything, even the aborted arguments from the day before, but they were the only thing he would find again; he never lost those, the arguments, always with Alcira (he had them all recorded, as in a ledger).