There’s something I forgot to mention. The same man who let us in showed us out via the back door, which opened onto a different street. Before leaving, I saw one of Catalina’s cars. A cream-coloured Beetle. When I was little I used to like sleeping on the back seat, because the engine was at the back of the car and it made the seat nice and warm, plus riding in the car was a good opportunity to chat to my dad until I dozed off. My parents didn’t keep that car. Catalina has the same one, in the same colour. I haven’t seen that model since I was a girl, with those interiors, that same mixture of smells. How strange to see something in real life that looks just like a childhood memory. I felt as if that car could have belonged to my parents, or as if the car from the blue pencil sharpener days and Catalina’s car were two dots along a line that was illegible to me, or as if that Beetle were an incoherent sign or a piece of this goddamn jigsaw puzzle that gets harder and harder to solve.

27

27

After dinner, Catalina had us move through into another room. A baroque altarpiece, some pre-Hispanic masks on a wooden table and a selection of works by young artists. The younger of the teenagers sat on a quartz chair shaped like a hand. Catalina told him it would do him good at his age: ‘It will align your chakras, my dearest, so make yourself comfortable.’ The cook came in with a china tea set, a little plate of orange peel, a sugar bowl and some tiny pincers which Catalina used to distribute sugar cubes. I said I didn’t want any, but she offered again, as if she were interested less in sugar than in conversation. With me?

‘Come on, we’ll put some music on.’ She strode ahead, leading me towards a wooden cabinet at the far end of the room. She asked me to open the doors carefully, because the cabinet had sentimental value. Knowing her, I thought, the wood could have come from one of the first guillotines. ‘What kind of music do you listen to?’ she asked. She wasn’t impressed by my vague response, but I was interested less in finding shared tastes than in testing the surface of that frozen lake which seemed about to crack with every step. ‘I was expecting a more convincing answer from you,’ she said, removing a record from its sleeve. Catalina chose a bolero. At that point she was turned away from me, looking at the altarpiece, moving one shoulder in time to the music, singing under her breath, then moving the other shoulder, in circles. Singing, moving her left shoulder, then her right. She was humming, moving one hand, as if following the music, then moving the other, in time, when she asked:

‘Do you know this song?’