Up until that summer I had spent my childhood without a fixed home, moving back and forth between my mother’s and grandmother’s houses. My mom owned an apartment in the Parinacota projects, in Quilicura. A small social housing apartment—which the government traded her for a savings account with one hundred thousand pesos in it—where there was almost never food or water; the stove and the pipes had been stolen during a few weeks when the apartment had stood empty. So we would sleep there at night, when there was no hunger or need to bathe, and the rest of the time we were at my grandmother’s house. I also stayed with my grandmother on weekends and the days when my mom disappeared. Sometimes my older brother Mauri was there too, but most of the time I was alone, because my brother had also started to disappear without warning. I called my grandma “Mami” and my mother “Mama,” and I had similar names for my grandfather and my dad, though my dad was practically a stranger to me because he’d been in prison since I was a baby.

Mama and Mami. They both loved me, but they were hard women. You couldn’t imagine them whispering. My grandmother was a fat woman with the face of an Arab. She spent her whole life working a stall in the market, and as an old woman she converted and became an evangelist. She called my mother “this one” or “the dummy” and said that she was God’s way of punishing her. She never mentioned, though, what he was punishing her for. She used to tell the story of my mother’s conception as if it were the omen of her downfall: she’d already had five children and was old to have another, but after a botched operation to remove her wisdom teeth she’d had to take antibiotics, and they had neutralized her birth control pills.

My mother’s name was Karen. She was dark-skinned, with frizzy black hair and squinty eyes. Her flaccid body and spotted, wrinkled face made her look like a fifty-year-old woman, though she was only a little over thirty. My grandmother said she had no right to complain, given the “low” way she’d lived her life. My mother had gotten married at seventeen, had two sons and largely abandoned them, and then she met my father and had me. Today, in spite of her record, I don’t think of her as having been particularly intense. Rather, she was someone who simply didn’t care much about things, who lived each day according to her own rhythm.