When she reached the third floor she let out one long, final sigh. Her building was a cement cube of four floors. It was surrounded by a network of similar blocks connected by walkways and parks with thick-trunked trees and high branches where various species of birds nested. A good place to live, it had to be said. After four years there, Denise was still surprised when the noise of the lawn mowers woke her up on Sundays. She had never lived with the color green so close before, or such concern over gardens and flowers. She’d spent most of her life in places where it was common to pay the neighborhood drunk a few coins to pull up the weeds. In her first years, she was caught up in the novelty of Ñuñoa, and she used to go out with her camera to walk around the neighborhood plazas and through Park Juan XXIII. She crossed the strap of her compact Fujifilm camera over her body as if she were carrying a revolver under her arm, and she wore a gray sweatshirt, her camouflage uniform. She liked to get lost in those streets, so different from hers, and look at the old mansions, with their modernist architecture from the ’50s, many of them empty or converted into homes for the elderly, or marketing headquarters teeming with pretty promoters. She would put her head through the bars and take photos of the well-tended lawns, the dry branches held like captive snakes in metal bars, the half-open window of an abandoned house, university students who went by looking very serious or very happy, the promoters smoking and talking while they hastily applied makeup. The old people in the homes were her best subjects, or at least the ones who most enjoyed having their picture taken. They posed smiling, or stared at the purple flowers that fell from the jacarandas while they waited for the day to end. She knew that one of the advantages of being a woman was that she came off as less threatening, but in any case she tried to go unnoticed when she took a picture, which was why she had chosen a small camera. Except with the old folks, whom she always greeted and thanked afterward. They often invited her inside, and on one occasion, in spite of her uneasiness, in spite of her idea that the photographer was an observer and not a participant and should maintain distance, she went farther in than usual and took one of her favorite photos: a close-up of a ninety-one-year-old woman who was smoking, half hidden in the backyard, her face mischievous, full, lucid.

That time was gone, and now she walked without noticing anyone, tired steps in a straight line from work to home, sighs between landings, spoons accumulating on the nightstand, leaving the apartment only when one more tea bag wouldn’t fit and she had to take out the trash.