They had met only recently, but they felt so close, like brother and sister, that the time they knew each other seemed to have begun with their birth. And then suddenly, like stealthy murderers that enter a house at night, the arguments had infiltrated their days, treacherously. As love grew in them, so did doubt and the tedious thoughtlessness that always accompanies love. Like the indelible creases of a poorly ironed suit, the creases of ill-humored shouts and silence merged: everything became an insult. Thus a mutual discord had settled between them, and their unspoken resentments hastened each fit of anger.

Cristian secretly missed their distant, different, confident love affair. It was so easy to have faith in what didn’t matter that much. Those romantic idylls in cafes, on grocery store corners, on beaches: they robbed him of nothing, not his sunny morning walks, nor his hours of leisure, nor the loneliness that made him fumble around for a human connection, nor the visits to his cousins’ house, nor the divine generosity of time, nor his misery of constant solitude.

He remembered Ethel Buyington and the unpredictable relationship that entangled them for a month. What an unreal sensation that transparent English girl gave him, telling him her life story that first afternoon sitting on a park bench. She talked about her childhood in a London public school. She didn’t live with her parents for more than four or five months of the year, during vacations. She had written a novel at age fourteen and under her bed was a box filled with all her treasures: a doll, a smaller box with compartments where she would collect, as in a museum, all sorts of curiosities: a butterfly, stitches from her appendectomy, an orange-colored stone, a seashell, a baby tooth, a doll’s eyes, and later the novel and then eighteen poems dedicated to her doll.

Ethel finished her studies more ignorant than when she began and went on to travel the coasts of Africa with a French family. While she was away her mother died, and her sisters sold the furniture and the family home. She received the news a month later; her treasures were lost in the move. When she returned to England, her little room painted with flowers and birds in flight was nowhere to be found; they had sold everything, even the chintz drapery. She couldn’t find her museum of boxes under the bed. She wasn’t fourteen anymore, not even in her early portraits. Nor could she write or feel as she had written or felt then. She became a dancer and always danced barefoot so as not to depend on dancing shoes that disappear under hotel beds on trips. Ethel was right.

But he, Cristian, needed such baggage! He needed all those books, notebooks and papers to do anything, and all those shoes to wear, even though he always chose the same pair and never danced in them.

Oh, the joy of acrobatic dancers who need only their body! But Alcira, on the other hand, thought Cristian. . . .