She wanted to say something: apologize, promise that it wouldn’t happen again, tell the assistant manager that she’d gotten lost, and with the stress and the hunger, had fainted in the street. That would justify her appearance and her amnesia. But no words came to her lips. She was overcome by a fear that her voice would break, that some interminably long pitiful wail would issue from her mouth if she attempted to speak. The grubby white curtains in the office gave a glimpse of the silent darkness outside. The assistant manager worked late when the books had to be balanced. Was this one of those days? Or perhaps it was now winter, which would explain the early darkness: that idea seemed outlandish, although in her head anything felt possible. But if she’d been wandering around the city for months, the assistant manager wouldn’t even have recognized her. She touched her bare arm, the hairs like a hen’s down. The assistant manager had let her go without commenting on her silence. Did she speak so rarely that it caused no surprise?

When she plugged in her phone to charge it, the clock showed 12:43 a.m., one day ahead. She’d missed a whole shift. On her return to the kitchen, La Burgos didn’t complain about her absence, and she thought that maybe she’d forgotten about it. The days were all so similar that they erased memory. Then her thoughts grew darker. Was she losing her mind? She dreamed that La Burgos was inside a car, parked on a bleak plateau. The sun was high in the sky and its light was blinding, but rather than warming the air, the chill it spread across the earth was so intense it made La Burgos squirm like a small, newborn creature facing death. She could taste her colleague’s hatred of her; despite the fact that she formed no part of the life of that dream being, she came to the conclusion that the level of ill will displayed by those dream contortions must correspond to something real. And she couldn’t bear that. Since she still had to prove that there was a relationship between living in the hotel and dreaming other people’s dreams, she began to spend certain nights outdoors. It was the end of July when she made the decision to distance herself from those dreams.