The strange thing was that none of the old people in the neighborhood, none of the grandmothers or grandfathers, remembered the owners of the house when they were young. As if they’d always been old. Or as if they were imaginary. Once, Vicky’s grandmother had said: When your grandpa and I came to live here, the owners, who were already old . . . and Vicky had interrupted, almost shouting: But you were young when you got married—they were already living here? And they were already old? Impossible, that’s crazy. Her grandmother hesitated and said she thought so, they were already old, yes, maybe they were Polish. What does their being Polish have to do with it? Blond people age badly, replied her grandmother. Not like you, Vicky, my pretty little creole girl. Vicky pulled away from her hug, and later, when they talked about it at the table—her grandma had already gone to bed—Hugo Peirano wiped his lips with a napkin and said well, she’s getting on in years, old people get confused.

That time Vicky kept quiet and cleared the table—green glass plates and brown cups: the forest table, she called it. She hadn’t eaten much. Adela was eating less too. They were both feeling the same thing. They were afraid. The fear was diffuse and Vicky couldn’t really tell where it came from, but it had started less than a month earlier, in front of the TV. She was in the living room with her family and the eight o’clock news was on. It was boring—stories about how the radicals had won the legislative elections, about the bomb threats in schools and the state of siege, which was making her mother hysterical—when a story came on that caught her attention: a volcano in Colombia had started to erupt. Vicky both liked and was afraid of volcanoes; for a while she’d been obsessed with Pompeii and Herculaneum. That night was only the eruption, but the next day Vicky sat down on the sofa with Gaspar sprawled beside her to see if they were still talking about the volcano, and what she saw left her speechless and trembling, so much so that she reached for Gaspar’s hand. The volcano’s lava had swept up ice and mud and all that material had flowed into the rivers, swelling them to four times their size and flooding the nearby towns.

“Oh, I’m terrified of floods,” her grandmother said, and Vicky shushed her.

In a village called Armero, lots of people were trapped inside their houses and waiting to be rescued. But all the cameras, in a shaky transmission with strange colors, were focused on a thirteen-year-old girl named Omaira—what a strange name, thought Vicky—who was half submerged in the rubble and mud; she couldn’t move, but she could talk, and when they gave her the microphone, far away in Colombia (where’s Colombia? Vicky asked Gaspar, and he told her it was a Caribbean country, but it wasn’t an island, it was next to Venezuela), the girl said something that made Vicky feel like running away, and she squeezed Gaspar’s arm until she got a hey, quit it out of him, which was a lot, because nothing ever hurt him. The girl, Omaira, said: “Under my feet, I can feel my aunt’s head.” Her aunt who had drowned, of course, thought Vicky, imagining slippery feet on a dead head while she mechanically adjusted her shoelaces.