The four of them walked down the street lined with English-style houses toward the park. Adela, as always, walked beside Gaspar. She started talking to him about dogs that came back, the dogs that waited in hospital doorways for their sick owners to be discharged, the ones that lived in cemeteries because they had stayed with their owners until the end. Adela was imaginative and theatrical and she’d been lying more and more, but her friends put up with it, and not just out of pity. She was fun. Adela lived with her mother in an apartment at the end of a passageway, a somewhat dark apartment because it was in the middle of the block and the light was obstructed by the buildings around it, and even by the trees in the neighbors’ large yards. Still, it was quite a pretty house; Betty, her mother, had a good eye for choosing fabrics and art reproductions, and the furniture was simple but comfortable and colorful, sometimes covered by blankets with Andean designs. The house was kind of hippie, thought Pablo, and very different from his own, with his grandmother’s old glass ornaments, orange birds and white swans, black toucans with yellow beaks and pink flamingos, all of which he was forbidden to touch. Adela didn’t have a father and no one really knew why, whether he had died or left. No one dared say out loud that he could be disappeared, though some ventured to insinuate that it was the opposite, that he was a cop who had died in a confrontation.

It was also a mystery why she was missing an arm. The stump was small and proportionate, as if she had suffered a clean cut above the elbow. Adela’s mother said she’d been born that way, that it was a congenital defect. A lot of kids were afraid of it, or disgusted by it. They laughed at her, called her little monster, butt-ugly, half-baked; they said she should get a job at the circus, that her photo probably appeared in medical books. It all hurt her and sometimes she cried, but she had decided to always meet the mockery with more jokes or insults. She didn’t want to use an orthopedic arm. Generally, she didn’t hide the stump. If she saw repulsion in another kid’s eyes, or even an adult’s, she was capable of touching it to their faces, or of sitting very close and brushing the other person’s arm with her useless appendage until they were on the verge of tears.

Adela’s version of the story of her absent arm was dramatic, typical of her. She claimed that a dog had attacked her, a black Dobermann. The dog had gone crazy—it happened with Dobermanns a lot, Adela said, the breed had a skull too small for the size of its brain, so their heads hurt all the time and it drove them mad. She said the dog had attacked her when she was two years old. She also claimed to remember it: the pain, the growling, the sound of chewing jaws, the blood spraying over the grass. She had been at her grandparents’ summer house, and it was her grandfather who had murdered the dog: his aim had been excellent, because when the bullet hit the animal, it was still gripping little Adela in its teeth.