A boy, who in the distance looked as tiny as a fingertip, approached the edge and stood gazing at her for a long time. Maybe he was trying to work out if she was a person or a doll. There were missed calls from the assistant manager on her phone. She was fired, the messages said, but the word “fired” didn’t sound like she was being thrown out; for her it was more like she was launching herself over all those streets where the inhabitants had dreams that would assault her the moment she closed her eyes. For an instant she longed for her room in the hotel, the clean towels, her morning shower, the placid hatred of La Burgos, her own dispossession, against which she was now rebelling in favor of something she couldn’t quite get ahold of. The boy took a few steps closer and stopped again. Then he took a few more. She wondered if the child’s wariness had to do with her or the esplanade. The locals had probably wanted a park rather than this barren patch of concrete, and now they and their children were boycotting it. Or perhaps they weren’t used to seeing homeless under the bridge, and a whispered rumor had been spreading through the buildings since first light: there’s a crazy woman sleeping down there. The child continued to approach, but before he got near enough to get a good look at her, she got to her feet and left.

Memorial

MEMORIAL

She received an alert. A portion of a black-and-white photograph. A thin nose, a cheek. An ear with a familiar shape. It wasn’t the whole face, but that didn’t stop her food from coming back up three times. Those bitter gastric juices were also due to the nickname: Apep Otein.

She’d never liked pseudonyms, yet that didn’t explain her distress. A sense of foreboding forced her to wait five days before opening the Facebook app on her phone. That was when her anxiety turned into terror. What she saw was the face of her mother, who had died two weeks before. Then she noticed that the name was her mother’s written backward. Apep Otein = Pepa Nieto.

The photograph was from the seventies, and she would have bet anything that it had never left the living room shelf. Yet it didn’t seem likely that her father, the only other person who had access to the family albums, would have opened a Facebook account with a portrait of his wife at the age of twenty-seven and her name written in reverse. Unless he was going mad.