After months of being dispossessed of a part of her life, and with its recuperation now in sight, she nevertheless found it hard to come to terms with the loss of her own personal dreams. One Tuesday, sometime after midnight, she got up and, without changing her nightshirt—it was red and looked like a dress—went out into the street. This time she opted for a row of benches near a church. That secluded place showed its age in a way that was different from the downtown buildings, with their tawdry, short-lived ornamentation. She fell asleep the minute she lay her head down and didn’t open her eyes until dawn. She had the impression that the city was empty. The streets were silent and the fresh, early morning air, which would soon disappear in the blazing sun, seemed to belong on some astral plane rather than in the earth’s atmosphere. She got to her feet. A police siren cut through the air. It was a dense sound, twitchy, as if jumping between various forms of deafening melodies. The silence had ended. Shutters grated as they were opened, the traffic roared; the city was waking and stretching. She ran back to the hotel but still arrived late. The receptionist gave her a silly, suggestive look and said, “What a cute dress.” She didn’t respond. When she got to her room, she put on her uniform and, without even washing her face, went to the kitchen. La Burgos’s dreams hadn’t invaded her sleep. To be honest, she didn’t remember what she’d dreamed, although the emptiness around her when she woke, as if the city had become an architect’s model, did belong to some forgotten personal dream sequence.