The closest she had gotten to the feeling she yearned for—indefinable even for her—was when she used to get off her night shift as a cook in a restaurant on Suecia. At around one thirty in the morning, a line of people would grow at the bus stop, almost all of them workers in Providencia like her. They waited in silence, and in the air you could feel the exhaustion and anxiety and also a certain defensiveness, and ten minutes or an hour could go by and everyone stayed just like that. Until the Transantiago buses appeared, three or four in a row, barreling in from far away, enormous, their lights up high, full of hope, like trucks carrying food to a village isolated by disaster. And as they approached, the workers’ attitude changed and an energy started to course through them. Denise felt it too, and it was as though something were set free, as if they all let out a big sigh. The wait was over. In those seconds, on tiptoe with her head held high, she really did belong to a place, even if the place was also difficult to define, even if it didn’t exist physically, because it wasn’t the bus stop, or Transantiago, or the street. It was a place she could never stay.

No one visited her and she didn’t bother to invite anyone over, and so it didn’t even make superficial sense to worry about her room. No, putting down roots was definitely not for her, and when she realized that, she got rid of the decorations, sold her camera, and dropped out of her photography studies—the second major she had quit. She erased the files of her favorite photos: the blind man walking and holding a little boy’s hand, the university student biting a Latin dictionary while he held a hot dog in his hands, the student protestor wearing a black ski mask with fox ears while he lit a barricade of tires on fire . . . At the end of the day, it wasn’t that she aspired to take photographs for National Geographic or Magnum; photography had just been an excuse to go back to Santiago and test those dreams that had gotten stuck in her head.

Mesh netting hung from the roof of my parents’ room on the second floor down to the kitchen on the first. My father had installed it so the sun wouldn’t beat in so hard in the mornings. He slept in until after twelve because he worked nights at the airport. He tried to keep the room as dark as possible, the curtains drawn and the door closed, accumulating a warm torpor in the room that I liked because I related it to his personality during the first hours of his day, when he was sleepy and affectionate.