No, she had never met her father; her mother, maybe; she remembered, thanks to certain minor details, certain gifts, a young woman who must have been her mother: a little gold chain with a coral pendant, a young woman with blonde hair she’d seen two or three times. No brothers or sisters. At that point in the questioning, however, she spoke at length and with enthusiasm about her grandfather, whom all the other children had seen, since he had inspected the whole camp on the day of their arrival. They knew he was one of the founders.

‘Is your grandfather rich?’ one of the kids asked. He was the oldest one in the colony, a veteran who had been coming for a few years, and had scaly skin that smelled like fish and eggs.

‘I don’t know,’ Silvia replied.

‘But what does he do?’

‘He owns a bicycle factory.’

‘That means he’s rich,’ the boys and girls all said at the same time. ‘That’s why you have nicer clothes than we do.’

Silvia didn’t like having a rich grandfather, or being better dressed than them. Not because the other children were poor, much poorer than she was, or because her grandfather’s presumed wealth or her different clothes made her an object of curiosity and questions, but because she felt estranged. And she mainly felt estranged because of her great sensitivity to smells which, furthermore, stirred up great excitement among the other children, who stuck weeds under her nose, a bay leaf, a butterfly, and she, blindfolded, could recognize everything, never once making a mistake. But she also felt estranged for another reason, and this reason, which was closely connected to her sensitivity to smells, was that twilight feeling, only now she felt it at other times, even during the day, and at night. She could only describe the feeling by saying to herself, ‘I feel like crying.’

August arrived, and the ‘I feel like crying’ feeling got stronger, for some reasons that were quite clear and others that accumulated with the passing of days; in fact the smells had turned slightly colder, different from before. In some sense they were changing: maybe the sun warmed things less, and besides, it seemed to her that the cicadas and crickets no longer chirped as much. This evolution in the quality and substance of the smells and in the timbre of sounds and murmurs was more pronounced and perceptible at dusk, always at the same time, after the brief service in the chapel, and at that hour even the colours in the sky were no longer the same. For a few days Silvia was allowed to wear the clothes and sandals the others did, but – and this was something she would never have expected – her sense of estrangement grew. Dressed like the others, she felt even more different, and the ‘crying’ feeling increased. She went back to her own clothes. One day a thunderstorm turned the camp cold, then the sun returned, but it only occasionally poked through quickly moving clouds, grey and pink and beige. In those days of fluctuating weather Silvia wanted to cry very much and sometimes she went to cry in the lavatory.