Tamara spoke to her again when she turned eighteen. They bumped into one another at the window of a record shop. “I’m going in to buy Portishead,” she said. “Do you want to come along?” They spent a long time standing in front of the “P” for Portishead repeated on the black sleeve and the screen on the back wall of the store. She liked the sound: Portishead. Portishead-Tamara: those names were linked for her. They went to the park and sat on the grass to continue their conversation about music and about when they used to play among those shrubs whose name had something to do with skulls. They didn’t mention the six years of not talking to each other, as if everything that happened between the ages of twelve and eighteen had been erased. Then they walked into El Canal. Some of the older houses were okupas now, squats. Beer and calimocho were for sale in the front yards and ska music was playing. They finally ventured into one of the okupas, and after a few drinks went to another, which was on the street where Tamara’s grandparents had lived. She would have sworn that it was even the same building.

Her memory of the day they had visited Tamara’s iaia was vague. It included a dish of baked rice that an obese woman who wasn’t floating near the ceiling served to Tamara’s parents, siblings, and grandfather—not wearing his yarmulke—at a table that filled so much of the living room it was impossible to go to the bathroom until after dessert without everyone having to get up. She has no idea what they did afterward, or why she’d even had lunch with Tamara’s grandparents. The images froze there, the aftertaste of garlic, potatoes, and beans mixed with the rice and the iaia’s bulging calves. As if the old woman’s legs were basic ingredients of the dish.

The okupa was a two-story building with a terrace and patches of dirty blue and white tiles on the façade. In recent years, whenever she’d passed through El Canal—heading north to the market gardens rather than to the beach—she scrupulously avoided this side street. If she ever accidentally found herself at the intersection, she ran in the opposite direction, her eyes fixed on the ground, convinced that her refusal to look would save her from an encounter with Tamara. Her incursions into El Canal had nothing to do with her friend; what interested her was the neighborhood’s reputation, a notoriety whose origins were lost in time (within the short time of her own life, in fact). Apparently its inhabitants possessed certain qualities not shared by the rest of the population, and on more than one occasion she’d followed someone, hoping that their journey through the narrow backstreets would reveal something beyond her reach. A secret city. Bodies from the rock or from the sea.