As she gets up she puts a hand on the edge of the tub and rests her cheek against the cold ceramic, and then she remembers the brain teaser. She’s gone back over this episode in each bath she takes. When she was in third grade, the teacher gave the class a riddle. Whoever solved it would get an A. The riddle went more or less like this: You are in a closed bathroom in a castle, with stone walls and no windows. You draw a bath, but as you do so, the handles break and you can’t turn the water off. You try the door but it’s locked. If you do nothing, the bathroom will fill up and you’ll drown. How can you save yourself? Her seven-year-old heart speeds up and her mind goes into overdrive to find the answer. She looks nervously around at her classmates. She doesn’t care about the A, she has enough of them already. What she won’t be able to stand is the defeat if someone else gets the answer. She’s known how to multiply and divide since first grade, and to read and write since she started school. Her mother prepared her to overachieve, to be the brilliant girl everyone believes she is.

She clutches her seat with both hands, bites her pencil, the end of her braid, her sky-blue smock, and her mind is blocked.

No one in the class manages to solve the riddle, so the teacher reveals the answer: “You pull the plug!”

“It’s so easy!” say the students, laughing. But she doesn’t laugh; she is mortified. She was unable to solve the riddle. She’s been put in her place: she is not as smart as she thinks.

I guess I should have realized then. I see at least three funeral processions go by every day, double or triple on the weekends. When I’m lying down and looking out the window, or sitting on the balcony. At first I couldn’t believe it; now it’s nothing special. It’s not about me, it’s the street I live on. I just happen to live along the route to all the cemeteries around here: the General, the Catholic, the Jewish cemeteries, the Parque del Recuerdo and the Metropolitan.