When I was a boy, for my entertainment, Papá tied a handful of balloons to a nail in the wall with string. Within a few days some of them had popped, and others had lost their air and become tiny and wrinkled. Someone took the balloons away, but the string stayed for a long time, I noticed it there years later, because it was under the eave and neither sun nor rain damaged it.

I don’t think I’ve remembered it since and don’t imagine it could possibly still be there. Still I want to see for myself.

I have no trouble locating that part of the wall and yes, the old bit of string certainly has disappeared, but the nail, under innumerable layers of whitewash, remains. Perhaps my father put it there with his own hands.

I greet my mother, she sighs, and, no doubt alluding to the new woman in my life whom she doesn’t know, says, “May it be for the best, hijo.”

When I see Marcela she asks where I was. “Saying goodbye to some things,” I tell her, and she understands.

One night I tell Marcela about the girl in the window.

They were demolishing the old school and its spacious courtyards, behind my house. At the back of the lot, a wide, horizontal apartment building went up. Little by little people moved in.

A young woman leaned out of one of the windows and stayed there, contemplating the evening.

I had the idea of waving at her, and she responded in kind.

We saw each other every evening, the girl in the window of the apartment building, me on the terrace of my house.

We didn’t signal each other in any other way. I thought that at some point I would go looking for her.

Between the two buildings was an empty lot, and a building went in there which blocked my view of the window. I didn’t see her again.

Marcela asks me what else happened with that girl and I tell her nothing, nothing else.

•

The morning’s reading matter:

A couple was found dead in a hotel.

The receptionist heard two gunshots on a high floor.

. . . accompanied by a retinue of police . . . room 501, 5th floor, 22 year-old female, unmarried; 41-year-old male, married . . .

Both of the deceased presented bullet wounds to the right temple. According to the experts, the man shot his companion, then took his own life.

Two letters were found next to the bodies. Their contents have not been revealed but there is presumed to have been a suicide pact between the pair.

That night we’re alone, in the dark, in each other’s arms. I ask her, “When?” (Our pact has no date.)

She doesn’t answer.

I don’t insist, I wait. It’s Monday.

Bibi invites us both to her house. Her mother shares the table with us and the home-cooked meal tastes of hospitality.