Before the war, when she was a child, Alicia had often taken that route, holding on to her parents’ hands. She remembered walking past the shop window of Sempere & Sons with her mother and stopping for a moment to meet the gaze of a sad-faced boy observing her from behind the glass pane. Daniel, perhaps? She remembered the day her mother bought her her first book, an anthology of poems and legends by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. She remembered all those nights she was unable to sleep, believing that Maese Pérez, the ghostly organist, would be hovering by her door at midnight. She recalled how she longed to return to the enchanted book bazaar where a thousand and one stories awaited her. Perhaps in that other lost life Alicia would now have been on the other side of that counter, putting books in other people’s hands, making a note of the title and its price in the accounts book, and dreaming about that journey to Paris with Daniel.

* * *

As she approached her home, she began to feel a dark resentment rising in her again: a bitterness that dragged her down to that shadowy room of her soul, with no mirrors or windows, in which she lived. For a moment she imagined herself turning around and returning to the bookshop to meet that woman straight out of a story, Beatriz the Pure, and her smiley cherub. She saw herself holding Beatriz by the neck against the wall, digging her nails into that velvety skin, putting her own face so close to that white soul that Bea could peep into the chasm hiding in Alicia’s eyes. And then she saw herself licking Bea’s lips to taste the honeyed happiness blessing the lives of people among whom Leandro had always said Alicia could never count herself: normal people.

She stopped at the intersection of Calle Aviñón and Calle Fernando, just a few meters from her home, and hung her head, filled with shame. She could almost hear Leandro laughing at her in some corner of her mind. My dear Alicia, creature of the shadows, don’t hurt yourself by dreaming you can be that little house princess waiting for her champion to come home, filled with joy as she takes care of her adorable children. You and I are what we are, and the less we look at ourselves in the mirror, the better.

“Are you feeling all right, Señorita Alicia?”

She opened her eyes to discover a familiar face, a fragment from the past. “Fernandito?”

A warm smile spread over the lips of her loyal old admirer. Time had taken with it a poor boy with a feverish mind and a fast-beating heart, and returned a good-looking young man. And yet, despite all the years gone by, his gaze was still as entranced as on the day he had come to bid her farewell in the Estación de Francia.

“It’s such a joy to see you again, Señorita Alicia. You look just the same. What am I saying? Even better.”