MY MOTHER SAT at the kitchen table in Aunt Matilda’s house and went over everything that had happened while Aunt Matilda moved around the kitchen. Every time I entered the house my mother was in exactly the same chair, telling the story of my father’s death, and his funeral, and the doctor and the nurse, and his brothers and sister. Sometimes she would remember that she had left out a detail from an earlier part of the story and she would go back to that, but my aunt would then become mixed up and would fail to understand that this was in the week before my father died and not the day after the funeral. My mother spoke as though telling the whole story, going over every moment of what had happened, might suddenly lift her out of her current plight into some bright new future. She acted out her rows with my uncles and aunt while her sister still moved around the kitchen. Not once, in the time we were there, did I see Matilda sitting down.

At mealtimes, my mother switched into Spanish and told my uncle and my cousins what she had been telling Matilda. I listened to her some of the time. I liked the story, because I knew what was coming next; I had been there while some of it happened. My mother left nothing out and made nothing up. My uncle paid her no attention, interrupted her in mid-sentence to ask for more food, or to ask some mundane question, and stood up at the end of the meal and went out. My cousins kept their heads down and left the table as soon as they had eaten. My mother sat at the table without offering to help in the preparation of meals or in cleaning up afterward. She made it seem natural, part of the deal she had with her sister, and thus neither she nor I noticed the resentment building up against us.

The day after the episode in the barn I looked around for Juan, but he did not appear, and I did not know where he lived, and did not want to ask my cousins. But the following day I met him as I crossed the field. He had a small handball with him; we played with that for a while and then moved down toward the river. We sat down on the dry grass and talked. He told me that he would be leaving school soon and he would probably start working on the estate. At first, his job would be to round up cattle. He would like to learn to drive a truck, he said. I told him about Buenos Aires, and about my English school. He asked me how to say various things in English and I told him and he smiled. As we stood up to walk back, I asked him if we were going to the barn. He looked puzzled and asked me what I meant. I did not know what to say, but as we walked on I referred to what we had done the previous day, and he said that we would go back some other day. I had presumed that our meeting and walking toward the river and our playing and talking were all preliminaries to our going to the barn.