Tepepunk and Nina are back from Japan. We stayed up chatting until late. It turns out that Catalina, the art collector Tania told me about a while ago, has bought one of Tepepunk’s pieces. On Friday she’s hosting a dinner party at her house so she can meet them. They’ve invited me along.

Tepepunk pulled the bell cord. A man in jeans and a white shirt opened the door and led us through the garden to a small room. Catalina was sitting in an armchair between two tall, handsome teenagers with curly hair, who looked around fifteen or sixteen years old. ‘My friend Vico’s children,’ said Catalina. Without moving from the armchair, she introduced herself as Catalina, looking at Tepepunk, seemingly unaware that Nina and I were there.

Catalina, in her seventies, had short, wavy, completely white hair swept to one side with a tortoiseshell comb. Pearl earrings and a little tight-fitting black dress with long sleeves. She rose to pick up a bell. On her feet, she was level with my shoulders, a woman small in stature. Tiny, in fact. A well-proportioned body, a beautiful face. I thought she was attractive, elegant. She invited us to sit down. Switching between Italian and Spanish, she mainly addressed her friend’s children and Tepepunk. She asked him some questions about his return to Mexico, about the residency in Tokyo, and asked him to say more when her friend Vico arrived, since he’d once been a cultural attaché in Japan.

‘And are you Mexican?’ Catalina asked me. She’d taken a piece of crystallised orange peel from a dainty plate and was pointing it in my direction. It didn’t seem to matter whether I answered the question or not; waving the orange peel at me was her way of acknowledging my presence in the room. She asked Nina the same thing, pointing at her with the peel from which she’d just taken a bite.

The room, unlike her behaviour, was very welcoming. There were recognisable artworks: a Dr. Atl, a Baldessari, a Ruelas, a sketch by Frida Kahlo. Some old hand-coloured photos. White armchairs, a heavy wooden table in the centre. An upright piano, and some antiques on a little table between Nina and me. A wooden radio, a pendulum clock, a metronome, a pair of binoculars and a bronze rhinoceros. The background music made our exclusion less awkward.

Each object seemed to be there to tell the story of some journey, event or family achievement. An Italian relative who survived a fire, perhaps, and that bronze rhinoceros was one of the few things found in the rubble. An uncle playing that piano, to the rhythm of that metronome, in the first silent screenings in a cinema in Rome. A cousin in Tuscany humming the love songs she heard on the radio that no longer works. Everything there seemed to have the sole purpose of allowing Catalina to talk about her past.