Soon, I went back to school, and when we attended church on Sunday now, people came up and spoke to us and smiled at us. Faded old ladies and men with mustaches shook our hands and asked us if everything was all right. Mr. Walters found my mother a job in a small English hotel called The Home Counties Hotel in San Telmo. Her job was to take charge of reservations and to sit at reception and give people their keys and make up their bills. It was, Mr. Walters said, a very refined hotel, and my mother liked the job and did not have very much to do. The pay was not good, but if she was prudent, Mr. Walters said, she would be able to get by. And if she needed extra money for clothes or school-books or some emergency then the English community in Buenos Aires would be prepared to help out. He was sure of that.

When I came home from school my mother would still be at work. I put my school texts and my copybooks on the dining room table. I was alone there, except for some ghostly remnants of my father that hovered in corners, except for some aspects of myself which I did not understand, desires and longings which did not seem part of the everyday world, which would not have been understood by the Church of England congregation as they greeted us on the way out of Sunday service. Sometimes, when I wandered around those empty rooms, I dreamed that I was a woman, not a girl, but a woman like my mother. I opened her wardrobe, and touched her clothes, found that most of her things would fit me. I imagined I was her. I bolted the door of the apartment so that if she came back early she would not surprise me as I put on her clothes. I stripped and pretended that I was a woman; I put on her underclothes, her brassiere, and then her dark skirt and blouse and jacket. I put one of her hats on my head and I moved about the apartment.

There was an old Life magazine which someone had given her with page after page of photographs of Kennedy’s funeral, of world leaders following the cortége, but, more importantly, photographs of Jackie Kennedy dressed all in black, wearing a mantilla, tearfully walking behind the coffin. I dreamed that I was her, I found a mantilla in a dusty old trunk in my mother’s bedroom, and I walked slowly around the apartment as though I were following my husband’s coffin. I looked at myself in the mirror, my shape, and tried to imagine what it would be like to be married, to take my clothes off in front of my husband, to go to bed with him, to be penetrated by him. I did not do this every day. Sometimes, I went to the hotel and waited for my mother in the lobby. But other days I went home and made myself into a woman, looked at my face in the bathroom mirror pretending it was a woman’s face. When people asked me what I was going to be, I found it hard to answer. I had no vision of a real future in which I would take part, in which I would find a job and start a family. I wanted to be a woman, I wanted to have a tragedy and dress in black.