The first night Aunt Nana spent with us, my mother came into my room. I heard her climb the stairs, the knocking sound of her square heels that she called classic, but to anyone else were just old-fashioned. Steps that were serious and strong, just as she wanted to be perceived. Footsteps very different from the ones I heard at dawn, when she was barefoot. When she went downstairs around four in the morning, in the dark, carefully, trying not to wake anyone up. In her nocturnal steps there was something she didn’t show to anyone, something of fear and submission. I imagined her standing there looking out the window, hidden by the veil of the curtain. I never dared go down and find out what she really did.

My mother turned on the bedside lamp and sat on the bed. “Are you awake?” she asked. I turned toward her. She looked tired, bone-weary. I got the feeling she didn’t want to be there, as if someone were forcing her to sit there with me. On many occasions I often felt like something came between us, as if the annoyance were floating in the very air we breathed, inevitable. She merely sat in silence and smoothed the sheets with the palm of her hand.

“Your aunt Nana has always been the same,” she said suddenly, with a touch of contempt that, deep down, held a certain admiration. I thought she was going to scold me for shouting at Aunt Nana at breakfast, but she didn’t say anything that revealed she knew. Instead, she told me that she’d lived with Aunt Nana until she was five. That her mother had had two daughters very close together and she couldn’t take care of both, considering there were three other siblings. That since she was the oldest, she was the one who went with Aunt Nana. I didn’t understand what she was getting at; what concerned me was the coldness of her voice as she spoke to me. She said they’d lived in a very old house with a wooden roof, and that when she had nightmares, Aunt Nana would lie down beside her, and together they counted the knots in the ceiling boards. The game ended when my mother fell asleep. I looked at the ceiling of my room, which was smooth and had some fluorescent stars stuck to it. She sat for a while with her eyes fixed on nothing, silent, and a little while later she said goodbye.

In the doorway she turned around. “Where’s your father?” she asked me.

I looked at her without answering.

She sighed deeply and left. She took off her shoes and went to her room in stocking feet.