At that moment she knew that there were no limits to what might appear on Apep Otein’s wall. And she was right. Two audio files were uploaded; in the first her mother was singing, in the other she was giggling at Tootsie, one of her favorite movies. Then came photographs of the restaurants she used to frequent, hotel rooms she’d stayed in, rooms of the houses where she’d lived, the French patisserie she dropped into regularly for coffee and cake, quotations written in notebooks, clothes in shop windows, dishes she’d cooked. They were all related to situations her mother had lived through with her; or rather, that she had lived through with her mother. Those voices and images were scraps of her memory. No one had ever wasted film on a steaming hotpot on the pink and white striped tablecloth that was put out for everyday meals, or shop windows, or dentists’ waiting rooms. That archive of memories only existed inside her head. A couple of them did turn up in her photos stored on old cellphones: one was taken after an argument with Pepa in a VIPS restaurant, another in the funeral parlor. In the latter, her mother was laid out for burial, her body on display beneath the glass of the coffin. The shroud couldn’t disguise the meagerness of her flesh, and her face was expressionless, there wasn’t even a crumb of her past, a glimmer of how death had come to her. Her lips were sealed with adhesive. She’d taken the photo at the instigation of an aunt, who had told her she should have an image of her deceased mother.

“Otherwise you’ll regret it,” the aunt had insisted.

Although she’d been unwilling to take the photograph, she was superstitious. And she’d always attributed that aunt with a special, indefinable form of wisdom. She’d framed the corpse in the camera on her phone and clicked. Afterward she looked at the image again and again without the least emotion whatsoever, and not the faintest idea why it might have some value for her in the future. Then she was given a smartphone and the photo was left there, saved on the old one.