She had her habitual green handkerchief tied around her head so tightly that it looked like the knot was preventing a spill of some toxic substance. Although she was as skinny and wrinkled as a raisin, she always stood up straight and elegant.

The house was extremely tidy, just like her, and lit only by the doors that opened onto the courtyard. Argenis wondered if Consuelo still slept in the little servant’s room out there, or if, now that Renata had left her the house, she slept in one of the family’s bedrooms. Probably the woman was still attached to her monastic cell, as if any other space would cave in on her. A few pieces of hundred-year-old mahogany furniture had been reclaimed by Renata’s sisters “for their sentimental value.” Without the dining room table and the gigantic, mirrored armoire Argenis and Ernesto had hidden in as children, the space was even bigger and more extravagant for a single woman who still insisted on wearing her servant’s uniform, even though her bosses only appeared in the two or three photos that still hung on the walls.

The television was on and the electronic music that signaled the beginning of the afternoon news streamed from it with a stubbornness like Consuelo’s own, a stubbornness that Argenis interpreted as pride, the ascetic’s sin. “See me here, virtuous and mortified,” he imagined her saying, challenging God to find any desire in her, stubbornly covering herself with the infamous blue cloth she used to elevate herself above the material world she had always despised – or which, as Argenis thought, she had never understood.

The lights were off and Argenis dared to turn one on without asking permission, so that Consuelo could at last see the coconut and sweet-potato candies he had brought in a paper bag.

“Look. At. What. I. Have. Here,” he said, raising his voice and enunciating each word. “They’re sweets for your San Miguel.”

“Be quiet, fool,” she said, going into the kitchen to put the obligatory coffee pot on the stove. “You think I’m deaf or something?”

Argenis wondered if his grandmother’s other faculties were in as good a shape as her hearing. She hadn’t been possessed for ages. Her body had weakened, and she now suffered greatly with the visits of her saint: her nose bled, her bones hurt. Watching Consuelo refilling her empty sugar bowl at the back of that kitchen, Argenis thought that San Miguel had abused his horse, like those officers in the wars of independence who rode theirs until they dropped dead.

The smell of the sea came through the window. Its proximity had already rusted out a couple of Nedoca refrigerators and this latest one only shut when Consuelo put her old bench in front of it to block the door. That wooden bench with its rounded seat, where Consuelo had sat sideways for decades to clean rice, peel plantains, and listen to the radio while awaiting her orders, had not changed at all. This was not the case with the cabinets, sculpted by termites, and the silver forks Renata’s sisters hadn’t taken away, which now sat in the drying rack with tines as greenish and twisted as the relics of a medieval saint. Argenis sat on the bench, following the tracks of the insistent memory of his grandmother sitting on it, pulling stones out of some long-grain rice. Although it worked well enough to keep the refrigerator door in its place, the bench creaked under his weight.