On the day I graduated from the Horticultural Institute, the sun was shining as usual, and I rode my bicycle to the new park in the north of the city, the one already made famous by the newspapers, though construction had only just begun. I presented myself at the park office. At the time it was temporarily housed in a building that later became a café where visitors could order coffee and sit outside in the shade of a giant plane tree. (The tree itself hadn’t arrived yet on a flatbed truck; it was still bending in the provincial wind somewhere, oblivious of the plans in store for it.) There he was, sitting behind a desk piled with papers and drawings, the famous botanist and landscape architect, newly crowned director of public gardens, browned and silvered from sun and age. He hardly glanced at me. I’d like to apply for a job, I announced. We have all the gardeners we need, he said, and went on turning the pages. I don’t know what possessed me—maybe the courage that comes with being in the presence of one’s fate—but I said: You don’t have one like me.

Now he looked up, and a species of smile slid across his face, then disappeared around the back of his head. He studied my pants first, the dirt under my nails, and at last my face. I stiffened under his gaze. And what sort is that? he asked, leaning back so that his chair was forced to let out a terrified squeal. I thought of the withered Phalaenopsis bellina I’d found in the garbage a few months earlier, which I brought home and tended until one day it began to send out green shoots again, and, God help me, I said: The kind that can wring new life out of the dead.