She stepped into that room as if she were going back into a forgotten memory. For a moment she told herself that this place could have been her destiny if the war hadn’t snatched from her everything she possessed, if it hadn’t maimed her and abandoned her on the streets of an accursed land. If it hadn’t turned her into one more puppet in a show from which she knew she could never escape. She realized that the vision she could divine inside the four walls of the Sempere & Sons bookshop was the life that had been stolen from her.

The gaze of a small boy pulled her out of her daydreaming. He couldn’t have been more than two or three years old and was installed inside a white wooden playpen next to the counter. Crowned by a mass of fine fair hair that shone like gold, he had risen to his feet, holding on to the edge of the playpen and looking straight at Alicia, studying her as if she were some exotic specimen. Alicia melted into one of those honest smiles she could summon up on cue. The little boy seemed to be sizing up her smile while he played with a rubber crocodile. Then, in a notable feat of air acrobatics, he proceeded to fire off the toy in a parabolic flight that left it at her feet. Alicia knelt down to pick up the crocodile, and then she heard the voice.

“For heaven’s sake, Julián! What are you up to . . . ”

Alicia heard footsteps approaching around the counter, and when she stood up she saw her. Beatriz. Close up, she seemed as beautiful as she was described by fools and busybodies who, as expected, felt inclined to say little else about her. She was graced with the unassuming and youthful femininity of a woman who has experienced motherhood before reaching twenty, but the look in her eyes was that of a woman twice her age, penetrating and inquisitive. In that brief instant in which their hands touched, when Alicia handed her little Julián’s toy and their eyes met, they both felt they were confronting a looking glass through time.

Alicia gazed at the child and told herself that, in another life, she could well have been that young woman with her serene angelic appearance, a woman who surely must give rise to longings and sighs in the neighborhood, the very image of the perfect wife in fashion ads. Beatriz, virtue incarnate, also gazed at the stranger, a dark reflection of her own self, a Bea she could never or would never dare be.

“I’m sorry about the boy,” said Bea. “He’s quite determined that everyone should like crocodiles as much as he does. You’d think he could like puppies or teddy bears like other children, but no . . .”

“A sign of good taste,” said Alicia. “All those other children are silly, aren’t they?”

The child nodded a few times, as if at last he’d found a sane person in the universe. Bea frowned. The way that woman looked reminded her of the stylized, exquisitely evil witches in the storybooks Julián loved so much. Her son must have thought likewise, because he had stretched his arms out as if he wanted her to pick him up.