Back when the episode with the riddle happened, she’d thought that having a bathroom with a tub was the kind of luxury only millionaires enjoyed. Until she was five, she could fit in the cement laundry sink in the kitchen, and she tried to imitate a solemn pose while she was in there, as solemn as the golden lion’s feet on the tubs on TV. Back then her father still hadn’t left home and she went to a subsidized school called Pythagoras. Her mother moved her to a different one a couple of years later, for two reasons. The first and most important was that she realized it was a project school that didn’t prepare students to leave the projects. And the mother wanted her daughter to be something more, something more than she had been. Something more than something more. The second reason was because Don Osvaldo, the school janitor, was accused of abusing and raping several of the students in kindergarten, first, second, and third grades.

She put her feet up on the faucet to cool down, and she heard the downstairs neighbors shouting. Lately, their voices had been her only contact with the outside world; that, and suppers with her mother. She had closed Facebook and spent all day in a seventh-floor apartment in one of the many towers built on the ruins of old manor houses, buildings whose tenants she held in contempt because they always acted like customers, impatient and rushed. Indifference and forced disdain to emphasize their pride at having made it as far as they had. She didn’t say hi either, and she paced, wandering almost all day around the apartment’s forty-five square meters. Simultaneously impatient and apathetic, zero dignity.

Since her return she’s led a pallid existence, like morning yawns. Half asleep all day, heating up the food that was left for her, eating a little and throwing the rest into a grocery bag she hid in the garbage can. Watching Seinfeld, the favorite show of the man she had lived with, but without laughing as much as she used to. Drowsy all day and unable to sleep at night. On these nights of insomnia she still imagines the child she could have had with the man she’d lived with. A beautiful child, truly beautiful, who would have inherited his father’s height and his straight, pointed nose. A thought that thrilled and disgusted her at the same time. Because it was what her mother always said about her father, that she’d chosen him for the greater good, to improve the race.

Other nights found her out on the balcony. Listening to the fountain in the plaza that made it sound like it was always raining. Smoking one cigarette after another, her heart shrunken, as she waited for the lights to go out in the buildings around her.

I need to hear something I can trust, like the bark of a dog.