The first one is an everyday memory. We’re playing in her room, making shadow puppets with our hands. Nothing spectacular: we bend our wrists and open or close our fists to make swans and snakes that fight each other. I’m fascinated, not so much by the animals as by what we’re doing: it’s what friends or parents and children always do in movies when they’re happy. Sonia’s hands are fat, like inflated plastic gloves, so the shapes she makes are always more solid. I laugh, and she tells me my fingers look like noodles; I try to catch hold of her hands, and when she sees the absurd difference in size, she laughs too. Her hands are also very rough, as if she worked in earth and mud, although of course they’re marked by the opposite kind of labor, pickled by soap and bleach, the rags and brooms she uses to clean the dust away.

The second isn’t a memory of my own. It’s a story I star in, but that I intentionally forgot. Still, my parents repeated it so many times that it ended up lodged in my mind anyway. The little girl dials her mother’s work number and waits nervously. Sonia, the woman, stays lying on her bed, motionless as a mummy. They stare at each other in silence, and one of them looks at the other in disappointment. They have to wait until nine that night. “Couldn’t get away any earlier,” I say, repeating my mother’s exact words. “She had her handcuffed to the bed. I don’t know where she got that idea,” I say to myself again, and the voice I use to mimic my mother’s is accompanied by laughter.

It was a mischievous act of little importance: there were some handcuffs in the house and I wanted to play with them. It’s incredible when something you don’t even remember sticks around for so long. Sometimes I wonder why I forgot it. It’s not because of my age—I remember things from when I was even smaller. That’s why I think maybe it’s something more, that maybe somehow I forgot it in order to get rid of a part of myself. As if handcuffing Sonia, beyond the simple game, revealed something; an air of maliciousness, of a spoiled brat, of power.

I sit beside Sonia and she admits that she’s not donating her clothes. She’s taking them with her, and she’s leaving our house. Then my mother comes in and sees us hugging. We close the bags and take them to what will be her new job, a big house where she’ll have to take care of an old man.

Since all of that happened, more than twenty years have passed.