In the past she’d enjoyed writing, particularly poetry. At the age of sixteen she’d shown her poems to a girlfriend, who talked about the strength of the images. One day a mutual acquaintance told her that, behind her back, her friend was saying her poetry was really bad but that she was too embarrassed to tell her so. After that, she stopped writing. She didn’t see it as giving something up and wasn’t angry with her friend. Before the poetry she’d had a thing about drawing blue perfume bottles on wooden panels and writing “In Hawaii” on the labels. She’d also bought herself an electronic keyboard and started practicing the skills she’d learned in her childhood piano classes.

She’d eventually given up on the keyboard, and anything else that she might have excelled in. She hated any form of distinction, particularly after studying fine arts for a year and sharing an apartment in Malaga with an actor. During that time she thought people looked down on her because of her social background—she was the only student who had to work her way through college—and lack of ambition. She dropped out of the fine arts class, returned home to her mother in Huesca, and took a course in hotel management. Being broke began to seem like a virtue. Her mother was upset; she’d always wanted her two daughters to make something of themselves. That was why she’d sent them to the conservatory. Her sister had given up the piano first, and was now a stylist in a Marco Aldany salon.

She didn’t like the scene she’d written about the woman calling a radio station. It felt gross. But she didn’t destroy it. She was aware of something too vivid, not in the images themselves, but in the way the dream had unfolded, something she could access through her text. At lunch she heard a customer tell La Burgos that her eldest child had died of stomach cancer and she was doing everything in her power to die in the same way. The third time the customer had asked for her steak to be cooked longer, La Burgos had come out of the kitchen to check on why anyone would order charred meat before she went ahead and ruined it. Charred meat, the customer explained, was carcinogenic. She’d started drinking, smoking, and eating burned meat so that her body would develop malignant cells. When La Burgos spluttered a “But, señora…” the customer replied:

“Forget the ‘but señora’! I’m not bothering anyone. I just want my meat to be charred. That’s what I’m paying for.”