This is the first chapter to Living Hours, a translation of Mónica de Neymet’s Las horas vivas. It is, undeniably, the first all-English draft. The manuscript has under gone its second and final edits, and, if all goes well, should be published in full sometime before I die. [Update: An odd story is in progress. In attempting to secure the rights, I contacted the Mexican office of Editorial Grijalbo, the publisher listed in the book. They replied that it was actually published by Grijalbo Spain. I contacted them, and they said that they don't own the rights, and they don't know who does. I'm currently trying to find the author, but with no luck. If you happen to be Mónica de Neymet, please drop me a line.] While working on the drafts, I have made notes in places as to what was changed and why, in order to give you a feel for exactly what a translator does when translating a novel-length work. In the meantime, here is a brief outline of the process:

• Find a novel that either hasn’t been translated, or one that was translated poorly or long ago (necessitating revision).
• Read the work in the original language, getting a basic feel for the characters, plot, and other salient details.
• Compile the first draft. This draft is only about 85-90% in English, with the more difficult or obscure passages left in their position and original language.
• Review the draft once more in its entirety. It is uncanny how once almost undecipherable passages suddenly become lucid. At this point, the draft is approximately 98-99% English.
• Consult with native speakers about the remaining phrases. There is a difference between being fluent in a second language and being a native speaker. While being fluent is sufficient for almost everything necessary to live in a foreign country, literature is an exacting art. A fresh set of eyes almost always improves a work in any case.
• The first all-English draft is born. At this point, the manuscript is still not fluid, but it is more-or-less accurate. (The sample that follows is at this point.) Now the hard part begins.
• The French compare translations to women: those that are faithful are ugly. Up until now, the process has maintained the original work as closely as possible, almost like a more intelligent version of Babelfish. Many individuals consider translation to be dull work, and it can be when doing things like MSDS sheets (which I’ve done), for example. Indeed, all the work on the manuscript to this point is rather onerous, dull work. Now, however, the translator becomes an author, and has to rely on his ear for dialogue and eye for prose, with an extra constraint placed upon him by the original author. When science meets art, things can be either confused and ugly, or clear and beautiful. It is the translator’s task to ensure the latter.
• Finally, the manuscript is reviewed for grammar and typography. This surprises some, as unskilled writers think that proper spelling is of paramount importance. However, in the heat of writing, words should simply flow off the pen, and exceptional care to trifling details can slow the process to a trickle. Write first, then edit!

This is not necessarily how all translators work; we all have our own preferences and style. This is what works for me. YMMV.

Original work ©1985 Mónica de Neymet, ©1986 Editorial Grijalbo, S.A. Miguel Hidaldgo, México, D.F.

I awoke this morning to sharp, annoying thuds of green furniture being forced through the door of the apartment next door. I heard voices resonating in empty rooms and floors that were covered with a protective layer of dust, a delicate rug. I didn’t know that Laura and her husband would be living there, or that she worked in television, as I would find out through the tangled, imperfect communication thread that my maid, Maria, timidly gave me each morning; but I felt that my isolated apartment, where I listened to Vivaldi and translated Latin every day, was threatened by those invisible strangers who were going to come with problems that would reverberate in the walls and explode very close to me, within ear’s reach.

I’d smiled then, on a cold January morning, while I snuggled beneath the fresh blanket and the red mattress that are too small for me now, as I’ve kept them since I was a little girl, imagining, almost feeling, the smooth fog on the road.

I knew that Maria was there in the house, docile, with full cheeks, one hand in the pocket of her apron holding on to her keys to keep them from jingling so they wouldn’t make noise that might wake me, standing next to the jute curtains, hesitating just like every morning before she finally opens the window; resisting it, although I had told her to, in order to let in the sun or the cold. She would wait a moment... tap the front of the window...

Up until then I had considered it natural for the apartment next door to be empty, as nobody lived in these box-buildings-they were only part of the street scenery, and little doors to emptiness through which those walking through the city sometimes disappeared. Until then, my only problem was my thesis, a problem that grew and held me paralyzed in its tentacles for almost two years. Years in which I no longer had attended classes at university, as my studies were finished-at least the papers I got in offices said so: Record of Termination of Study. And, although I didn’t have another job, translation, which was the first part of the thesis that I had to present in order to get my Master of Letters, made little progress, even though I reassured myself that each paragraph wasn’t the definitive version, that I will have to revise once more some latinate expressions that weren’t very clear, that I would correct them later, that sometime later I would be able to polish up the editing.

But that morning I began to be a bit curious about the outside, a light little bud (from sickness? from immaturity?) of curiosity was awakened by noises outside: thuds, yells, recommendations, parcels too, although invisible, from the figures, and Laura’s authoritative voice giving instructions, because there she would be the master of the house. Made-up, energetic, good-looking, with false eyelashes and a brown tailored suit appropriate for a woman in public relations.

The new apartment smelled like wood--cedar, Laura thought, and also a little like the varnish on the brand-new furniture. She was alone and enjoyed those moments of tranquility. Mario had went with Lupe for clothes and other things which the movers hadn’t brought. Laura wandered through the living room. It was spacious, with a low ceiling, wood floors and bamboo curtains that let in a shadowy, agreeable light. She remembered the cold morning, maybe a month ago, when she had been there for the first time. That same cold and a light fog that blurred the ugly and dirty parts of buildings while she went up the driveway in her small red car.

She looked at the dense branches of the trees, whose shadows made it still seem like nighttime, though it was six o’clock in the morning, and lent an atmosphere of intimacy, of smooth and tranquil happiness. What was happiness? she had asked herself. Mario by her side. Mario slept by her side, hidden under fat eyelashes above those cheeks that, when she kissed them, always felt so cold. Skin that tasted like pineapple.

Mario kept on sleeping that morning, of course, still single and unemployed. He hadn’t wanted to go with her. Maybe it was a little bit of revenge. And maybe it was her fault. She had supported him since that September night when she pressed him to leave the theater where he was a director’s assistant. She convinced him that it wasn’t a good job, that he deserved better. Ever since then, he pressed her recommend him for the new TV programs, and he accepted no other kind of work. Not Mario who, though she didn’t pay much attention to the fact, had taken classes in acting and singing, preparing himself to be an actor. But she wasn’t going to help him out. Months had passed, the hours would pass and Mario would still sleep until nine or ten. Then he would open his bright, black, mocking eyes and go downstairs, without getting dressed, in a housecoat, to the dining room in the guest house.

It turned out that number 710 on Calzada de Tacubaya belonged to a modern building, five stories tall, that looked like a box made of crystal. She liked it from the moment she first saw it, and she was also happy that the Chapultepec forest was so close.

When she got out of the car, she could see bright, clean corridors through the transparent, brilliant entrance, contrasting with the green mosaic on the fa�de. A fat man, with a shirt that once had been white and a scruffy black mustache clumsily hurried to open the door from inside. What was this crude hick doing there so dirty?

"Good morning. Who are you looking for," the man asked her.

"I want to talk to the landlord. I’m interested in an apartment."

"Come in. I am the landlord. Come through here. There’s an elevator."

At the end of the hall, on the left, was a small, new elevator that he showed off as if it were a gracious mercy on his part. Laura had repressed a feeling of disgust at having to share that cramped space with such a boring man. Instinctively, she brought her hand up to her face. She wanted to smell her own smell, her perfume.

"My boyfriend already came to look at the apartments. He told me he had one picked out..."

The landlord looked at her curiously.

"Ah! It’s you! Yes, a man came, a young man, dark-skinned. He said you would be here sometime."

"Yes, that’s him."

"He reserved 403. There are four apartments per floor, and five floors. Two face the street, two the back. The ones in front are more expensive and the ones in back are already taken."

Laura stopped and noticed the pale yellow color of the walls in the living room. She would have to get some paintings so that they wouldn’t look so empty, she said to herself. She entered the bedroom she and Mario would use from that night on. The two bedrooms were small, with rose-colored walls, big closets from wall to wall where her clothes would fit perfectly. She looked at herself in the mirror that stood on the floor, on top of the rug. She tugged on her brown wool jacket and noted with satisfaction that her skirt had no wrinkles. Executives, directors, journalists, publicists, and the like always had to be impeccable. A good presentation was also part of their work, it constituted something like a test of their efficiency and reliability. Made-up from the salons, fine clothes, high heels. She hadn’t put on much makeup; that’s true, a little retouching would be necessary...

She left the bedroom and looked at the boxes piled up in the living room. She wasn’t going to do the unpacking; she would leave that to her maid. She had to be in the office before noon, but that was a little while off. She took her makeup bag and went into the bathroom. The bathroom was also rose-colored, as was the spacious, happy bathtub where she would be able to enjoy long, relaxing baths when she came home from work. The kitchen was small, too, but she didn’t care-that would be Lupe’s problem... In that apartment there was no space for unnecessary things, for old things, papers, mementos. Her relatives in Mexicali weren’t even going to participate in the wedding, she said to herself again. She would send her address to her brothers in Torreón, so they would send it to everyone else, if they thought it proper. She already feared, already heard the remarks of her aunts, uncles, and cousins: A woman of forty years married to a boy of twenty-seven! Absurd! Ridiculous! And an apprentice actor, to boot! They would call it a barbarity. Unfortunately, their children, Laura Alicia and Jorge, would have to know about it soon. No, not soon. She would tell them when their school year was done and they were getting ready to go back to Mexico. That was six months away. She didn’t want to worry about that right away. The important thing was that in the future, Mario would always and permanently be next to her. She looked at herself closely in the mirror: There were those growing defects in her skin! But she would be able to conquer them, hiding them under a cap of makeup. She spread the rose cap of thick liquid over her face. Yes, it was too heavy. She took a little water with her hands and patted her cheeks while she thought about how well the year had begun. The wedding and the move went well.

It spread out before her, like a expensive rug, a new practical life, comfortable and deluxe. In 1961 she had to be happy. She thought back again on that morning when she came to know the apartment. The huge rent had surprised her: 1200 pesos. It was more than she had had in mind to spend, but the landlord told her that as that one was one of the back ones, he might lower it to 1000.

"Go on," he recommended to her, "Call the owner on the phone. I’ll give you his card downstairs."

In the hallway by the entrance, no man’s land, Laura picked up the apparatus, that black, magical tube that had domesticated her negotiations so well. She hadn’t looked out the apartment’s window, pulled back the curtains, didn’t see the vacant lot full of trash that she hated so. She picked up the receiver, with the confidence of one using what is theirs, to tell the office that she was on the way and she wouldn’t be late. Don Tacho, the landlord, came out his cave to give her a card. Opening a door that faced the hall, she could see a dark, smelly room, adorned with a portrait of Emiliano Zapata, whom don Tacho once saw as a child, lit by several candles burning in front of a strange print of the Holy Trinity. An unexpected cave in this modern building.

Laura spoke with the owner of the building, and when she hung up the phone the landlord was talking to a young woman, squinty, a little fat, wearing an apron stained with grease. He spoke to her amiably, delicately.

"Don’t worry. If you can’t get along with that woman, find another one. I can recommend you to someone. There are many women here in the building who are looking for a girl. I can help you, you’ll see."

The fat, dirty woman, Ignacia, wiped her tears with the back of her right hand. She felt consoled by the landlord’s goodwill. Someone was going to protect her, and she needed it. She had quit her job in the building that morning.

"Yes, don Tacho, thank you."

The doorbell rang. Laura rushed to open the door. It was Mario and Lupe returning, loaded down with boxes.

"It’s so good you’re here! I have to go to the office," she said hurriedly and remembered that she had to make some copies of the door keys.

She kissed Mario on the cheek, took a last look at the living room while she got her purse, and said to herself before leaving: It certainly is a deluxe apartment.

In the apartment next door, mine, Maria Diosdado pulls back the jute curtains and looks through the thick glass that is the entire wall facing the east, before she opens the window.

There, behind the glass, separated by a solid, transparent border, is the vacant lot. It is far down, distant and cold, a messy nuisance. It is in the back of an apartment complex that has its entrance behind the building, not on the street like ours. It’s an old building, unkempt, almost in ruins, gloom in the hallways, walls cracked from the latest tremors, and it contrasts with this one, the building where Maria works, that is new and bright. There, in the lot, in that wasteland, old things pile up. There are dented, out-of-service gas tanks, piles of forgotten bricks, broken stairs, an elegant bathtub, still white, chucked out into the twisting streets, and pieces of walls and plates forming mountains of all kinds of rubbish and trash, over the soil, so hardened by the filth and cold that it was barely recognizable as soil. Hard objects, difficult to destroy or get rid of, those it was impossible to free oneself from.

In the air, crossing the space whimsically, seven rows of clotheslines that are filled with clothes every day-sheets, shirts, socks... On one side, in a corner of the trash-lot, is a shack built out of planks. Someone who fills in for or pretends to be the landlord of the old building lives there. His wife is a wash-maid and, in addition to their four children, shares the room with a guest who rents a bed so they have money for food.

Farther back, in the third part of the lot, is a blacksmith’s shop. Its noise hasn’t started yet. It starts at exactly eight o’clock in the morning, screeching or muted, but always distressed, growing. It starts to walk, slowly at first, a clumsy unknown monster. It is interrupted at times, taking a quick break, and then picks up again, quicker and shriller, until six o’clock in the evening when the noise suddenly ceases, spent.

Maria, curious, stares at the diversity of the lot. She fixes her gaze on the shop where the terrible cogwheels that cut the metal are, the long swords displayed like enormous rooster feet that the shop’s workers pound until they are exhausted, then finally paint a bright orange color.

The shop is tranquil early, still seen from far away. For the rest of the morning she can only catch a quick glimpse while she runs the dust rag over the window, and even then she hardly lets her eyes go past the back of the patio. One of the men, the one who always wears a black shirt, gestures to her if she goes anywhere near the window. It is as if he were always looking for her, and he scares her, because she feels that they persecute her even here, inside the apartment, and because it is he who makes that light, like blue lightning from welding that, if looked at too long, leaves one blinded.

The man seems to know that she is afraid of that spark. There in the country, sparks and dry rays are punishment from the sky, and must be the same as that light. There, the lightning can run through the fields and enter houses, burning the women inside cooking. Although she doesn’t know for sure if there is that lightning in the city, in the country, there is.

After the first moment of surprise at the invasion of the noise my neighbors made had passed, I calmed down. Was I really calm? In that cold January even Vivaldi could barely assure me of an orderly, pleasant world in my restlessness. It was a white month, full of empty time, entire days lost in little unimportant trifles, excuses to ensure the translation wouldn’t progress. And the cold. I felt wrapped inside myself from the cold. I left in the mornings for any insignificant motive, and in the evenings, wrapped up in a heavy coat, I dedicated myself to reading some distracting novel, putting off the effort of sitting down in front of the typewriter.

The thesis! I reminded myself from time to time. The thesis went nowhere. I had to begin to organize my work again, after the family get-togethers, parties, and shopping for gifts for my nieces and nephews and friends, in December. I had to conquer a time and a solitude that would permit me to revise the translation once and for all.

Then the strangers appeared, the invaders that came in to the apartment with Maria’s commentary’s advance guard, which she gave to me right along with the orange juice, toast, and coffee.

"The neighbors came this morning. Did you hear them?" she asked.

But the notes of the flute vibrated happy, speaking to me of mornings that I like, yellow and warm.

"No, I still haven’t heard them," I answered her.

Through the window of the apartments on the top floor that faced the street, Sandra awoke. It was unpleasant to wake up that way on such a cool and cloudy morning, with an empty whiteness in her stomach and the gray air seeping in through the cracks. She didn’t have to do anything that morning, she said to herself, half-asleep, so why get up? She could keep sleeping. Every morning, or almost every morning, she fooled and calmed herself, telling herself that she didn’t have anything to do that day; that is, that she had no obligations, nothing that would oppress her or that could distress her.

She imagined then the smell of pine that perfumed her parents’ house in her childhood, not one day, but rather many days, towards the end of the year, around Three Kings’ Day. She had been so happy then! But what she could see through the window wasn’t a pine tree, but some dark clusters of trees by the street. Ash trees? Those would be within the reach of her eyes if she opened them, if she pulled back the curtains, if she wanted to see them. No. She wanted to escape again into dreams, as if she felt sick, as if she were too weak to get out of bed that morning. She took comfort in the certainty that the day was entirely, completely hers, so she could go on sleeping.

She seemed to consider herself very fragile, very delicate. She gave up the work that had bothered her the year before because of it. She left her hated post as an operator in the hotel. In any case, she was better at night. At the hotel, the owner would sometimes allow her to tend to some customers in the morning; but then she didn’t have time to eat or clean her apartment, and worst of all, no time to sleep. There were days in which, waking up, a date or an engagement, something that she had planned the night before, when she naturally had been in a quite different mood, threatened that half-sleep that she wanted to prolong.

She really needed to sleep, she thought. She had lost a lot of weight during the last few months. They envied her for it, but she had so little appetite and she felt weak. Almost all food, that white grease and alluring ham of their frugal, quick meals, along with the bread, like cotton anguish, made her nauseous. Sometimes they invited her out to eat, and if it was somewhere expensive, she accepted. But that also meant drinking... and the nausea returned.

She escaped into the white dream once again, fleeing from the pain. Then she thought of Julio. Months ago... she didn’t want to count the time! don’t let it pass! she was 24 and she always would be! It had been months since the majority of her thoughts referred to Julio Purse. Would she see him this morning? Would she be able to eat with him or at least see him in the evening? Her happiness depended on these questions, which Sandra had made a daily, early ritual. Most of the time her day would be empty, a long dragging of hours until nighttime when she would meet Julio. But it wasn’t possible to see him every day. He had many responsibilities. That meant that Sandra always needed to see him more than he needed to see her. Also, Julio’s desire to see her wasn’t growing, or at least it didn’t show that it was growing in the same proportion as hers did. And that made her despair.

A different Sandra, the Sandra that Julio met at a gathering of friends that met weekly to listen to music and talk about literature, the one that was taking dancing lessons and French classes, that discussed movies and worked as a model, and vibrated on the nights when Julio talked to her, in front of the flames of the crepes suzettes or the mango flambé in ritzy restaurants. Sandra was happy then, when she saw him happy, his bright eyes behind the tortoiseshell frames of the intellectual, the conscientious reader, his lips, small and cold, but not too thin, talking about things that didn’t interest her, except that it was Julio that was saying them: books, economics, politics, poetry..., moving his arms and hands over the plate that contained stuff more decorative than delicious or nutritious.

At dinner the Saturday before, when Sandra had been enthusiastic and vaguely saw, for the first time, her relationship with Julio as firm and enduring, some of his words hit her, warning her that Julio wanted keep maintaining a distance between them. He spent a lot at the restaurant they went to. The booths, disguising their nocturnal atmosphere, allowed better intimacy. Orange candles, between bouquets of flowers, made the table settings and the eyes of dinner companions shine. The tablecloths, also orange, the glasses of imported wine, the smooth music that underlined the conversations with a romantic tint.

She ordered quail, the most elegant-looking thing on the menu, and the taste and those little bird bones reminded her of the little pigeons that she used to eat occasionally in her childhood, between happy and sad at the sacrifice of the garden’s pigeons.

She finished and looked at the remains on her plate while she listened to Julio.

"Yes, we’ll go to the cinema Monday, like you want, and we’ll come back here, if you’ve liked it; but I must warn you that you have to accept that the importance of my work as Secretary won’t allow me to see you every day... No, don’t interrupt. We get along well together, I know, but I must make compromises because of my work, and I also have to have time for my reading."

"I don’t get in the way of your reading or your work, I only--"

"Let me finish. In order for our relationship to last it can’t turn into a tedious custom; it’s necessary that each member of the pair have free time so they can take care of other things, or enjoy the company of other people, friends, co-workers, I know..." Nonchalant, Julio savored the cognac, and she felt something stirring in her chest like a wave: it grew and her hair stood on end because that wasn’t a request that one can direct toward someone one loves! One can’t say, "don’t take my free time away" to one’s love.

"But when someone loves someone else, they want to see them as much as they can, every day, and worrying about work and reading comes later, right?"

"No, if you love me you shouldn’t take away that free time. Above all the time for reading, which is indispensable to me."

"Yes, I love you," she answered, crestfallen, rubbing the tablecloth with a finger wet with wine. She wasn’t afraid to say I love you, it was what she’d wanted him to say. But he still hasn’t!

Julio smiled. Sandra looked very pretty tonight. The food and drink had colored her cheeks. Almost beautiful at that moment. Then two friends of Julio that had finished eating came over to greet him and left, and Julio delighted in the envious looks they gave him. And then Julio would go on with the theme of his reading, followed by commentaries on the novels of Proust and Thomas Mann. Sandra, who wanted to win his affection, intimidated because of her lack of culture, at the seriousness and enthusiasm with which he spoke of those works, asked him, "Loan me those books."

And Julio, after thinking a moment, replied, "No, I’d rather make them gifts for you. I’ll buy them for you. I don’t like to loan out my books."

It was, for her, an inexplicable response, with that definitive "my", when Sandra thought that her things, if some of them could possibly interest Julio, were now-and had been for months-his, too.

She pushed away that unpleasant memory and stretched. That morning Sandra had no desire to get out of bed. She would pretend to sleep, then she wouldn’t get dressed or go to the beauty salon. That wasn’t one of those lucky days in which she would be able to see Julio. Suddenly the intercom rang. A loud, insistent, monotonous buzzing.

Sandra yelled, "Margarita! Margarita, answer it!"

Margarita, her maid, wasn’t there.

Small, pale Sandra, with her hair dyed a deep black, almost blue, in disarray, pulled herself together and sat up in the bed. Her eye shadow, blue and black, had run and formed a pasty stain around her eyes, like a mask. The sound continued, filling her with fury. She hated whomever got her up out of bed then, even though it might be Julio. Of course, she knew it wouldn’t be him. She got up, chilly, a little dizzy. It was the landlord’s voice.

"501, telephone!"

"Tell them to wait a minute. I’m coming down."

Might it be Julio after all? She went into Estela’s room. Estela wasn’t there and Margarita was probably still on the roof. They all got together up there, ignoring the fact that they were needed downstairs. She went to the kitchen and furiously rang the bell that communicated with the maid’s room. She went back to her bedroom, to her soothing and inviting and white bedroom, where there were only agreeable, pleasant things that invited sleep.

Over her pale blue nightgown she put on a transparent housecoat of the same color and looked around on the white, shag carpet for her silver slippers. She went over to the mirror with a napkin in hand and stood for a moment contemplating that face stained with makeup, deformed and sad, which foreshadowed the one she would have when... ugh! She hadn’t thought about that! She wiped away her old face with cream. She always told herself she would wash her face before going to sleep and clean it with some magnificent thick creams, rich, white, pink; perfumes in fat little bottles waiting to be used; but at night she was so tired she forgot, nothing mattered to her but sleep.

She became nervous that someone was waiting for her on the phone. Her heart beat strongly. She hurried and at the same time wanted them to wait, to get back at them for having bothered her, for interrupting her difficult tranquility.

Below, in a hallway bathed in light, a small table and a phone off the hook.

"Hello?"

"Oh! It’s you, Estela!"

"Come on! It’s about time you got up! I’m glad I caught you! I was afraid when Margara was going down and she told me you were all alone."

"No, I was asleep."

Sandra was cold in her short, sleeveless housecoat, so thin and pale blue, like she was wrapped in a light sheet of ice.

"What do you want?"

"They invited us out to eat. The one from the bank that came on business, and he brought a friend, a farmer or something like that, but he looks fine to me."

"To eat? I don’t think I’ll go. I look horrible and I wasn’t thinking of going to the beauty salon. What time is it?"

"One-thirty. Why won’t you come? It’s very important to me, ve-ry im-por-tant. Don’t be bad. Also, I think he’ll leave us quite a bit."

"How much?"

"We haven’t talked about it, but I five hundred, I guess. The one from the bank almost always..."

"OK, I don’t feel like going, but, since you insist, I’ll try to clean myself up."

Maria Diosdado came down the last of the four flights of stairs that separated her from the street. She never used the elevator, that small gray trap, gleaming with deadly steel. She carried her shopping bag and the money to buy food in her hand.

"This half-naked woman was talking on the phone," she told me afterward. "So the two of them came down. Her hair is so big it’s horrible, and I burst out laughing. That poor thing was so thin... and her feet must have been freezing in those slippers...

"And I heard her say on the phone: ’OK, tell them five hundred, or I’m not going.’"

I leave to go to the library. Every day, going out on the street is new and strange. The building’s door closes with only a slight click that is made very quiet by a coating of rubber on the metal, muffling it. I feel like I’ve come out of a hermetically sealed medicine bottle, from the immobile, temperate air of the apartment, where I stay locked up all night, to the cool, foreign, dangerous air of the street.

Now that I’m outside and the door is closed, I remember something I wanted to tell Maria. Maria doesn’t like to be alone; she likes to talk and gossip with me about things, and I listen to her and am interested. She probably thought I went down the elevator to fill one of the big, blue glasses with milk and get a piece of pastry for breakfast. Maria is thinking back on her town that, shadowy, like a cloud, surrounds her and follows her wherever she goes. She is remembering when it was quiet in the mountains, tending the sheep. I almost hear her breathing from down here. I prefer not to ring the doorbell, to not ask for anything else, to not startle her in her wakeful somnolescence.

In the directory next to the front door, only one name: Griselda, 101. So, in pen, only the name of someone who thinks that no last name is necessary for identification, that believes herself-what does she know?-so well-known and sought-out to only need one name.

The cold touches my face with a light slap, stiffening it. A little dazed walk to the corner. Sirens were sounding, shrieks from ambulance or police sirens. Something had happened, something that got all of the people together, much more people than there usually are at this time in the street. It’s early. Then the buses pass roaring. Mexico - Toluca - Zinacantepec - Valle de Bravo - Colorines and unload drowsy, bewildered passengers. Buses that are like an umbilical cord that secretly ties Maria with her town, because it’s so far away. Its passengers get off the bus that casts them into the city like an enormous fish, carrying all kinds of luggage, and they will be in the way of the festivities. They’ll rest a moment before deciding where to go in this labyrinth, or they’ll drag their cardboard boxes, tied with string, toward the newsstand on the corner, to ask the vendor the way to somewhere written down on a scrap of paper. They don’t let their belongings out of their sight and call after their children nervously, telling them not to go far. They don’t trust the city.

The smoke and unpleasant diesel smell grows, and the noise and the sputters of the buses that run, not stopping for anything, without it entering the arrivals that they have left behind the ranches and the mountains and have entered the dangerous web, dangerous themselves, of the city streets.

But now something has happened. Some boys are running. People are crowding around and there is a bus and some cars stopped, seized by the crowd. Someone hurt...

My feeling of being outside the scene returned, looking at people and things from a window. The window is the one in the room I had as a child. I see the street with its trees and the stone wall around the convent in front. I don’t have a face everyone else can see: I am the skeleton of the window. I can pay attention to and observe what happens, hearing what everyone else is saying. But they don’t see me.

The distressing feeling that it is dangerous to live there in the street, displaying a body and some features, getting acquainted with the neighbors in the whirlwind of the inhabited buildings, attending parties, mixing myself with the crowd surrounding the accident, having to run to call the ambulance, having to attend to it, having to look at it...

I don’t want to know what has happened and I run quickly, not turning my head toward the knot of cars and people, getting myself away, fleeing. I turn at the corner without stopping and keep walking quickly in front of the Spanish store and the fruit store, whose owners and workers have their eyes wide open at the novelty, the disaster that nourishes their appetite for horror everyday, commenting, craning their necks to see.

At dinner, I would find out what happened. Maria asked me if I had seen an old man in the building recently. The one with a white beard which he covered with a handkerchief and would go out with a little chair to take in the sun in the parking lot. Other times the old man went up to the roof and chatted with the maids doing the wash. He was quite a chatterbox... Well, he had been hit by a car that morning. He was Griselda’s father, the woman in 101. She told them that he was from Oaxaca, he had a house and land there, he came to visit his daughter every once in a while because she lived here married to a gringo who was the father of a little blond boy. The gringo had had to go back to his country, but he sent her money so she could take care of herself and buy food for the child; they got along a little better after that.

Until the day before Griselda left the building every day at around 11 in the morning.

Griselda had called herself Otilia, Nancy, Marisela, leaving used names as she took off one dress, happily and carelessly, to put on another that was more lustrous and fit better.

She has something exuberant, something of the forest that calls attention to her. Her big eyes black and almond-shaped, a fat mouth with a lot of makeup on it, a curly head of hair that was almost indomitable and dark skin, lightly yellow, which gives the impression of always being fresh and smooth. Her flesh, not so young anymore, is squeezed into a tight black skirt that, along with very high heels, puts a touch of something insecure and exciting into her walk. Her thin legs lend a bit of the frog to the outfit, seen from far away. Smiling, revels in the looks of the passersby, she expects them, and that’s morning, when she doesn’t wear her bright silk dresses, short and revealing, that show off her chest and her face like a display window.

She usually stops at the newsstand on the corner, knocked over twice the year before in spectacular accidents, and has been a witness to several incidents. She calmly reads the headlines in the tabloids and greets the vendor, who talks to her without taking his eyes off his two sons, who run dexterously between the cars, trying to sell newspapers. She comments on some news, a scandalous note, and turns to the corner. She passes in front of the Spanish store without stopping, she detests it, and heads to the little store next door, do� Ricarda’s. It is a fruit and miscellany store, filled to the brim with all kinds of food, in cans or bottles, that pack the shelves, and big baskets of oranges, mangos, or cherimoyas, according to the season, in a precarious balance, on wood cartons that invade the sidewalk and make passersby stop. There Griselda buys almost everything she needs for her daily meals and, next door in the tortilla shop, Ruth weighs her a kilo of tortillas.

I’d seen Griselda a little while ago in the store, wilted in those hours, with no makeup. The dark circles under her eyes hardened her face and her gestures were vulgar and sad. Without saying hello, I paid for the apples I had picked out. She threw back the first beer with do� Ricarda. They would drink more beers later with the taxi drivers that stopped in the store to eat their cakes, and picked up the laughing from the night before. That day we avoided exchanging glances. We didn’t talk although we knew we were neighbors in the building. Maybe she didn’t recognize me that morning, or perhaps I was only a witness. Do they not see me because I’m only a witness?

Maria opens the apartment door. She has swept and is going to get the dust outside, in the hall. Two women from the apartments in front are also out doing their cleaning. The younger one, se�ra Yolanda, blue slacks, hair tinted a reddish blond, short and poorly styled, is complaining to señora Davalos, who always has a cleaning rag in her hand. Maria sees them. They also see her, but Maria is transparent, insignificant, docile, submissive.

"I haven’t told you," Yolanda says, "that yesterday Ignacia’s sister came, the maid that works for me. In addition to charging me her sister’s salary-charging me for it!-although she won’t pay me for the glasses she broke and she won’t return the money she stole when I went out to buy bread, she wants me to rent the room upstairs for her. She says she is a seamstress and she has a sewing machine and can make baby clothes for my child once he is born. She seems to have an insolent attitude; but, anyway, she’s going to pay me a hundred pesos a month for the maid’s room. It will help."

Yolanda struggles to pull a plastic chest full of ice. At each movement she remembers she is expecting. She finally gets the chest into the apartment, the chest which she takes out every morning so the deliveryman will leave her ice. She goes back outside to continue the conversation.

Maria closes the door. She opens it again. Bits of conversation come to her in bursts.

"That woman isn’t so decent, if she’s going to have a child after being married for four months," other maids said to her on the roof.

Upstairs in the early morning hours the water is almost frozen in the washbasins. They almost can’t feel their hands from the cold, so they chat while they wait for the sun’s warmth before they begin to wash. Up there the wind blows strongly, making them shiver, curling themselves in their thin red or blue nylon sweaters, bought in installments, that are too small for them and they always wear unbuttoned, hiding their bodies. They gossip about the ladies downstairs.

In the fourth-floor hallway, Yolanda continues.

"Well, last night he came home yelling and I told him I didn’t hear him because I was in the kitchen. I had put some milk on to warm, because it takes a long time with that little electric hotplate. We can’t get gas because we owe for two months and Fernando fought with the collector the last time he came to collect from us. He came in, yelling, because of all the bills we owe. Afterward he asked me how I have been. Bad, very bad, I answered--if you already know then why do you ask me? Then you say I always complain...

"And of course everything was still dirty like Ignacia left it when she took off, a month ago now, and left me with everything disgusting-imagine!-with no gas and still no refrigerator, and I’m so tired! Then I said to him, do you think that I like to cook? I’d much rather go out to eat. I’m hungry, but I want to eat something I didn’t prepare myself. Yes, he told me, but a dinner would cost us one or two hundred pesos, at least. And I became sad and said to him, ’My, how you have changed! You used to want to take me out to eat and now you don’t want to spend the money even when I beg you to. And when you eat with your friends, what happens?’ He assured me that they almost always invite him. They often go with their boss and their boss pays, or, if not, one of his other co-workers from the office, who makes more.

"But we would be able to eat sandwiches or go to a cheap restaurant, don’t you think? Well, I told him at dinnertime that I wanted to go see a movie or somewhere else. Anything as long as I’m not locked up in the kitchen! Cooking food makes me nauseous; but he doesn’t understand, he’s very self-centered and it doesn’t matter to him."

"I don’t think so, Yolanda. Men see things in a different way. It’s not that it doesn’t matter to them, but their work, their responsibilities... they have many worries that we don’t know."

Maria stopped listening to them. She thought about her town. The smell of hay there, in December, in January. Or the smell of the barn, going there in the wee hours of the morning for milk, walking down the cobblestone street. The burros loaded with firewood that just came down from the hills, tied up on the corners, and the sound of hooves and horseshoes on the stones. The foamy milk that they poured unto the jug, and the butter-real butter-and the little jug of cream, and the bread in the big basket, warm, waiting to melt in her mouth. Good things that aren’t to be found here, that are unusual here.

"Well, yes, Fernando had told me that he had some very important matters to attend to that evening, but we would go to the movies that night. And when he came home at night, yelling, I already knew that we weren’t going anywhere. I told him to forget about the movies, I wasn’t going to make him go out with me, and I’d just go to bed early and I could go to the movies some other night with my mother. Right? I can still get around on my own, although things are made more difficult and slow by my condition.

"If you’re going to be like that, he said to me. Yes, I am going to be like this, I answered. I felt like crying. That’s right! I yelled at him, that’s right! You want to come home and find me awake so I can serve you your dinner! You’ve had the whole day to yourself in the office talking to people, and I’m stuck here like a maid between these four walls, and without pay! I served him dinner and went to the bedroom. I felt like crying. Don’t think that I’m going to put up without gas much longer. If Fernando doesn’t pay for it next week-and it’s hard because we have to pay the five hundred pesos that we’re behind-I’m going to eat with my mother, and we’ll see what he does."

Señora Davalos listens to her. She has shaken out her rag several times, swept the hall and cleaned the elevator door. She lets her speak and half-understands her, so contradictory in this attempt to feel independent from her husband and her desire to stick with him and to secure him definitively.

Yolanda suddenly remembers, still tearful, when she closes the door and she knows she’s by herself in the apartment, Fernando’s demands before they got married: If you don’t accept, it means you don’t love me, saying it to her very seriously, insistent, pressuring. It’s a test of love, don’t be afraid, repeating it to her, begging, commanding. What, you don’t trust me? You don’t love me?

And she remembers that she felt a twinge of heat in her belly then, a twinge that she felt few times since then, in which desire, guilt, and pain mixed; and that now, because that twinge is far away, she might confuse it not with remorse or regret at having accepted something bad that would disgust her mother, but with the first movement of her child in her womb.

In the library-fishbowl, smooth, silent moving of lips, slow, cautious movements of the fish weighed down with books, I force myself to continue my translation. They are the letters sent by Sister Egeria--in the IV or VI century?--from Jerusalem to her sisters in a convent in Spain. They are written in Latin. Their translation and the study of their language has occupied me for months. I look at the letters without seeing them. I am distracted. I look at the fish.

What does everybody else say to each other in the halls? Where is everybody else going in the morning, if not to the library? I am restless in this inhospitable January. Solitude? A frozen island on which the nun is alone, dressed in white. But no, I am the one frozen and enveloped by the cold. The nun isn’t alone; she travels, always accompanied by her entourage and her guardians, she converses, she writes, she prays and walks tirelessly behind her guides who say: semper nobis sanctus illi loca, cuae scripta sunt, demostrababnt.

On the route, the pious clergymen and nuns that went with us showed each one of us the places cited by the scriptures that were to the right and left of us, and, believe me my sisters, Israel’s children walked this route: they went as much to the right as they returned to the left, they went as much ahead as they came back behind and so they made this road until the Red Sea... We always wanted, and me especially, them to read the allusive passage to us, and wherever we went to we sang the psalms or the antiphonies appropriate for the day or the place.

That’s it. I read up to there and it’s ok. But do the others know the appropriate words for the day and place? Because I don’t know them. I am translating Egeria so I may know them. Also, the confusion of the festivities of adolescence past, the world gets sad and expands. This is growing up? It spreads out before us and we are left alone in a hushed plain that we would have to conquer by shouts to reach anyone else that is a few or many kilometers away. It’s such hard work! An exorbitant effort that sometimes requires the strength of a horse. To make oneself heard, and by whom?

I talked to a few classmates about the theme of my thesis, but they saw no reason for my enthusiasm and interest or for my tranquility; but having found a theme, I claimed to have come closer to the end of my studies and to have clarified my future a little.

"Egeria was a devout woman, perhaps a nun, or, if not, a simple single woman dedicated to religion," I told them. "She probably lived in the fourth century A.D., and wrote a letter called ’Peregrinatio ad loca sancta,’ and I will do my thesis about this work."

They, ignorant and suspicious, asked me, "What importance does she have?"

"What are you referring to," I replied.

"You haven’t indicated what interest there is in researching who this nun was and what age she lived in."

"Well," I responded, "this description of her pilgrimage to sacred sites is written in vulgar Latin, a Latin that now is transformed into Spanish; because some of the phrases she used, Egeria-or Etheria, as she has been called by different names, her name isn’t precisely known-indicated that she was Spanish, and hers is a little-known manuscript, and even less studied."

I continued before their silence.

"Even in Mexico almost nobody knows her, there not being more than two or three Latin teachers. When I finish it, one of them will edit my translation. The nun’s image is very pretty and is surrounded by an aura of mystery. On the other hand, there are many obstacles in doing my work. One cannot easily find studies about her, there aren’t any here, it wasn’t even easy to get her work..."

They looked at me strangely, as if they thought I was a little crazy to seek out such difficulties, and nodded their heads, thinking I was surely never going to present an exam with a similar thesis.

Yes, it’s as if nobody understood me. At times, I feel incapable of parting my lips, and I think that even if I spoke, no one would understand. Even in the daily matters of shopping, in stores, in the streets, on many occasions I have to repeat my words in a louder voice because they look at me like a foreigner, and even find a strange accent in my voice. They don’t hear me, they don’t understand what I say, or do I say things that are hard to understand?

Certainly I don’t recognize myself in anyone around me. Instead, inside books, behind that smooth and quiet and calming passing from the thin sheets of the old books with the fingertips sensitized and wise. There, inside those thick books I find myself and I feel better, above all in the pretty and thick books that have the golden songs.

Docile Maria carefully follows the instructions I’ve given her. She sweeps the rug, dusts the lamps and books, of which there are many, and changes the water in the vases. She sinks herself into her domestic tasks as if in a dream. She hides herself in that series of capricious jobs, small and ritual, that she completes almost fearfully.

Some days she has to go out to buy something. Outside is dangerous because the buses that come from her town pass in front of her. She is afraid of the street. Apolinar would be able to see her and would easily find her walking in the street. He would see her from the window of a bus.

She calmly goes down the stairs. The landlord pants while, with effort, he mops the first floor stairs.

"Good morning, don Tacho. I’m going to run some errands."

"Go on, go on, Maria," he answers her with the familiarity he uses with her, because he is from around her parts, though he still retains some formality with her.

While he has been working there in the building, several months now, Maria hasn’t seen if don Tacho bathes. He and doña Trini, his wife, don’t have a shower in their room. They have to go up to the roof to the maids’ baths, or they only bathe by cups...

In the hall one of the girls from the fifth floor is talking on the phone, half-naked. Maria shivers from the cold.

Outside, the white sun brightly draws the figures. Maria hesitates, afraid to go out and be seen, to be discovered. Opening the door, she notices that there are many names missing from the directory. She remembers that don Tacho told her, weeks ago, that he asked her patrona for a little card with her name, with choice of color. Trini uses the colors to tell them apart. But she has noticed that don Tacho doesn’t know how to read well either, and just looks at the comic strips and pictures in the newspaper. Trini, any way, is dumber. He has to take her by the hand to each door and tell her who lives there. She repeats it several times so she can learn them by heart and relate them to the numbers. She has to fix on the floor number and other things like the stains and marks on the walls and the mats in the hall.

Maria hurries back, having bought the cilantro and chili peppers to make salsa. She also brought tortillas, good tortillas, but not like those over there, handmade, made with that subtle aroma of the hardwood under the comal.

In the kitchen, Maria is calm again, and thinks about what later, after dinner, she tells me again:

"Everything started after my uncle died. My uncle had been taking care of me since my parents died, when I was a little girl. Then he died. He kept sitting there, outside the house in front of the little table where he put the seeds and fruit that he sold. His calm, Saint Joseph face and his white beard that was so pretty. Then the lambs that I had tended to for so many years became mine. But it was no use. Apolinar, my husband, became bad and now, not having to be afraid of my uncle, took one or two lambs to Toluca to sell them, and came back drunk. Then he wanted to throw me out of the house because he said I was bringing men in when he was gone. Because of this I wasn’t allowed to eat until he arrived, although he took a long time and I was hungry, and I couldn’t put on makeup or even wear shoes... barefoot and no makeup so no one would like me... one day he took me to live at his mother’s house, so she could watch over me, he said. Apolinar had always said that he didn’t like skinny women, and since I was skinny because I almost never ate, he looked for a fat woman and went around town with her drinking that drink called Prodigiosa.

Her hands pink and a little wrinkled from the cold water, Maria sighs. Bright drops of grease swim among the dishes. It is a sigh of relief because she is safe there. The work of washing the dishes seemed to defend her from any threat. Her timidness is a defense. Apolinar wouldn’t find her here in the city, among so many streets, so many buildings, so many people. She had come fleeing from Apolinar, and they had told her that she would be safe here.

There is noise in the kitchens. In the apartment in front, Yolanda stacks the dirty dishes on top of each other in the sink. She doesn’t like the feeling of cold grease on her hands. The dishes with the remains of food are a dirty thing, as if the act of eating converted what was on the plate, a carefully prepared dish, into something stained, impure, that her hands didn’t want to touch.

So she bought rubber gloves, blue and clean and smooth rubber gloves that she stared at now. They should get rid of the horror of touching the stained things with her hands. She feels timid, useless. She has to wash the plates and the cups and the pans, and she’s only half herself because of the exhaustion and nausea.

From the kitchen, among the noise of the water and the glasses bumping into each other, Maria contemplates, through the window, the pigeons on the neighboring roof. The crestfallen pigeons in a momentary silence. Suddenly the air fills with chimes from the nearby church. The pigeons are startled, jumping and flapping their wings. A moment later, they go back to straightening their wing feathers, tranquil, murmuring under the reddish rays of the four o’clock sun.

There are also the bells and potters’ red clay pots, which at that time of day would be sitting in the sun. A wound that got deeper each day. The countryside suddenly extended itself into the kitchen. The herbs, even in January, aromatic, warmed over by the sun, and the little flowers, pungent and yellow, assaulted by the insects.

Six o’clock in the evening. Sandra thinks that it is always better to do it in the evening, because at night she is tired and sleepy, longing for sleep. The afternoon is more friendly, more favorable, she says to herself while she takes a bath in the hotel. It doesn’t matter that the hotel is rather shabby, the red curtains covered with dust, and the bedspread, also red, somewhat threadbare. At least the shower works well. She skillfully turns the knobs and with slight adjustments vanquishes the cold water that was driving into her shoulders, turning the water into a lukewarm rain and then a fat hot jet that caresses her, allowing her thoughts to flow unfettered. Then she remembers André... maybe André will always appear with the hot water. She loved him, and then, she is sure, no one else, until she made the mistake of falling in love with Julio.

Now she wants to think about André, the André of five years ago, now bald but with some of his blond hair left. The water from the shower continues to bathe her back--it’s such a pleasure. André, who dazzled her, frightened her, almost drove her mad, so elegant, rich, French, so attractive he was almost unreal. He was the first. He was separated from his wife when she met him at a party Estela, naturally, had taken her to, and he wooed her with flowers, perfume, and elegant dinners and languid amorous evenings in his study. He was living there temporarily because he had left his house.

Sandra had asked herself then, "How can one pass the evening in any other way but by making love? What had she done before? Are there other evenings different from this one? What do the poor people who don’t love anyone do?" And she continued asking herself, but most of all, "What is there to do in the evenings if nobody loves you?"

The water stayed hot. It’s luxurious. That man can wait while she revels in the water. She wants to forget about him, relax with the tender, lukewarm rain that slides all over her body.

And the end. A ceremony that she remembers with delight and still with a little amazement. André invited her to spend the weekend at a resort with thermal spas. He had to reserve the private baths ahead of time. They had a big presumptuous bathtub, oval, supposedly elegant, almost a pool.

The stream from the hot water, bubbling, full of salts-even uranium!-and proprietary medicines, carefully enumerated on a little yellow piece of paper hung on the wall of the bath’s hall, almost suffocated her as she first went in. Some waiters and bathers, sweaty and friendly, dressed in white, gave her towels, formed lines and spread out a white sheet like a rug toward the tub. When she closed the door of the little room, she felt dizzy. Statues of marble, or maybe they were only plaster, of old beauties: Diana, Aphrodite, Madame Pompadour... white swans too, stained-glass windows with scenes of lakes and water lilies, sugary music that came from hidden speakers, the noise of the water gushing up, bubbling, sparkling, and André, floating with his sex like a flower, like a serpent, like a dragon, like a torch, like a bird-why didn’t she tell him? One night, when she wanted to say things like that to Julio, he stopped her, claiming that they were affected, and she kept quiet, embarrassed. Yes, perhaps they were, but with André they weren’t feigned, they were part of a rite that developed for the first time there in the water, in the heat, floating on desire. André bit her and slapped her, inflamed, excited, furious. What happened? What was that? she asked, startled, hurt. She didn’t know him to be that way, wild and violent, then suddenly soft again, and he kissed her very sweetly. Sandra lay drained. The marks of his teeth and his smacks remained on her skin for several days. But at the moment the fright and the pain had transformed itself into a voracious excitement that André enjoyed with delight.

She would find out later that André had taken her there as a farewell. He didn’t call her again. The telephone in his studio wasn’t answered for weeks. She didn’t see him again, although one evening she ventured out to pass back and forth in front of his window. Estela informed her, some months later, that Andr�had returned to his wife and kids.

The hot water caresses her, and she runs her hands smoothly over her body, feeling that much time has passed since she turned on the shower’s faucets. She has to get out now, she has to wake from that dream of water.

She can’t deny that, sometimes, with some man, she feels a little fear at first, when she opens the hotel room door, or when she begins to undress, for example; an exciting fear, but turbulent too, from which something monstrous and unexpected occurs. Then it dissolves itself in the prosaic development of an act that doesn’t have the significance it had with André and that it has acquired with Julio.

Like in that moment, now, a little apprehension at turning the faucet off, wrapping a towel around herself, leaving the bathroom, a little bit of fear and expectation that dissipates upon seeing, concrete and ugly, waiting for her half-naked next to the bed, this man.

It’s that time when it gets dark. My notebook and the dictionaries are open on the table, but my attention isn’t on them. It’s a sad hour, with a vague uneasiness running through it, the restlessness of not knowing what to do in those heavy minutes. Time is gray, goes slowly, appears immobile, suddenly stagnating and hardening into a gelatinous mass that dims objects. It doesn’t obscure them completely, however. Automobiles go down the streets, but those driving them forget, in that uncertain clarity, their objective, and circle adrift, until suddenly the red traffic light, standing out in the growing blackness between the burning streetlights, takes the apathy out of them, and they aim their machines toward their destination.

The cold pecks at the faces of the passersby and nightfall, an enormous, shadowy and dusty bird that perches atop the city, fills them with an indefinite deception. That’s January. I have begun working again. The year has begun and they realize that nothing can change that. They go on being the same. At least, they look the same, if a bit more disillusioned.

The cold also invades the insides of the houses and buildings. It is a silent sickness. It makes me feel small and unhappy. I don’t want to move, not even to turn on the light. The gears of my mind don’t want to go around. Immobile, I also let my thoughts drift, confused in that bewitching clarity-obscurity of evening.

It must have been a night in November or December, those were the months of exams, when Antonio wanted to accompany me to my house. We were talking about an exam in Spanish Literature, and about the value of Golden Age theater and my preferences: Calderón de la Barca up to Lope de Vega and all the rest. We take the bus at City University and, wishing to go on chatting, we got off a little far from my grandparents’ house, so as to have more time to talk while we walked. To talk. Almost a year of talking and taking classes together, almost a year of talking at the exit.

We went ahead, that same gray hour upon us, through the cold. The streets were deserted. Our steps echoed. Tall, almost black pine trees watched us, stopped next to a brick fence by a children’s school, gloomy and silent at that moment.

Antonio was against everything: against the teachers’ attitudes, against their obsolete teaching methods, against the study of the history of literature... They keep the students occupied with dead literature and push away the real problems, the social problems. So he hardly read literature at all, except contemporary literature, one that places a conflict before the readers; maybe some American, and some French like Sartre or Genet. But, above all, he repeated, literature had to live directly.

I, a Matilde six years younger, but already too sensitive, defended--as if it were necessary!--literature in general and the literature of the Golden Age. I still think that way; I admire the endurance of literature, its long life, much more enduring and pretty than the real and confused life that slips, without us realizing, between our fingers. I argued vigorously, surely less fragile than I am today, isolated in my labor of translation, closed up in my crystal apartment.

The sky had become heavy with leaden clouds. It was very low, coming closer to us with its obscurity. Suddenly Antonio took me by the jacket as if to convince me of the strength of his arguments. He had leaned toward me, because he was much taller than me. His face was very close, and I saw his big brown eyes, very close, as the dark skin of his cheek almost touched mine. I felt his breath. He scared me. I took his big hands off of me and began to run away, confused, trembling. I was afraid. Afraid that something irreparable would happen, like a kiss, or something dangerous like a declaration of love, na�e and compromising. Afraid of being seized by another, of losing my self and alienating it with someone that might be as insecure and weak as I was. I didn’t want compromises, I wasn’t prepared to put up with them. I didn’t want to be loved.

I thought I was very secure until then. Certainly more so than now, always doubting behind the parapet of my lenses and my books. Invisible, invulnerable, it had disturbed me a lot, had frightened me too much that moment when Antonio touched my shoulders with his hands--how clearly I remember his pretty, thin hands!--and brought me close to his body in a shy hug. We were barely twenty years old then. He understood my fear or my rejection, and backed away. Never again were we so close to one another.

Antonio left the College of Arts the following year and entered the College of Political Science. It was to be expected. I searched for the actuality, the reality that lashes out at us and deceives us from outside. I left the Spanish writers, too, but to go back to the Latin classics.

Maria comes into the apartment, opening the door with her key, and turns on the light, the ceremony of turning on the lamps that shatters the moment of nightfall like an opaque sphere breaking.

Maria enters the kitchen. Evening tea is being made in all the apartments. Plates and cups clatter and teaspoons clink, bathing in hot coffee. Some children are screaming, now tired and sleepy. Voices come through the window; they are fighting with each other. Their mother puts them to bed and kisses them.

Maria goes up to her room on the roof. I’m ok here, she thinks. I don’t want some man to touch my body now. Feeling the nocturnal air on her face, she remembers when, far away, children went to the hillside to fly kites. In the evening, when it got cold, they scolded the wind that came violently, packed with stars to place them, more dazzling and bigger than they would ever see in the city, around the town.

From inside the apartment, she listens to the elevator’s sounds. Yolanda was paying attention to those sounds, keeping a lookout for them. First was the muted sound of a mechanism setting into motion, of something getting closer, then the metallic opening and closing of doors with a sharp, clicking sound, and finally the footsteps of people falling away. It was eight-thirty at night and Yolanda thought Fernando would arrive at any moment. The elevator’s crescendo and climax happened over and over. She was imagining it. Finally she turned off the lights in the dining room and went into the bedroom. She was so tired! The whole day busy cleaning the apartment. Since Ignacia ran away she was a serf tied down by a multitude of heavy tasks, meticulous and fastidious, without ever managing a result that satisfied her. Something was always lacking. The rice wasn’t cooked well, the meat was tough, she hadn’t ironed the sheets or she had gotten the clothes dirty when she went upstairs to hang them in the sun. And, on top of it all, she had no money.

She sighed. She sighed a lot lately. That day she hadn’t done more than to go to the corner store; she didn’t even call her mother. She felt isolated, a prisoner. She didn’t feel like doing anything. Later, she spent the whole night thinking that Fernando would get home early and they would be able to go to the movies. But no, the film she wanted to see--happy, musical, with old actors that played the roles of carefree, happy youths, as much the happy Technicolor world that she had dreamed of--got farther and farther away as it got later and later.

Now it was impossible to think of going out: four minutes to ten. She got undressed. She turned out the light and got into bed. The noises grew louder in the darkness. The elevator’s noise continued, undisturbed and stronger, but it was never the sound of Fernando coming home. She heard keys, other keys, turn in deadbolts. In other apartments chairs moved, plates bumped against metal cupboards. Outside, cars stopped at a red light. Men and women, laughing, went into theaters and restaurants. They took off their jackets, anticipating and enjoying the soir�. Yolanda was paralyzed in the darkness. The night turned the apartment into a closed-up box.

Quiet, silent, kept in a box, which in turn was kept inside a bigger box of glass and iron which was the building, which in turn was packed in a black box that was the night, which in turn... Yolanda, now almost asleep, waited for her husband, keeping vigil over the night’s noises.

The darkness in the room grew like an animal that could strike or kill her. Yolanda became small and tiny in front of the monster and lost herself between the folds of the sheets.

Suddenly she awoke with a jump, sweating, filled with terror. Fernando hadn’t come home! She opened her eyes but couldn’t see anything. The night, the darkness...

She decided not to get up. She turned on the radio and the "on" button provoked a small explosion. A disembodied voice screamed announcing some unknown product. She looked for the station that told the time. In bed, she couldn’t find the knob to turn down the volume, so she heard a scream, "It’s three-thirty!" She turned off the device.

She was confused, disconcerted. She remembered fearfully that Fernando still hadn’t arrived. Could something have happened to him? No, he had probably went out to eat with his boss. Perhaps he had gone to the movies by himself and afterward was hungry and... But could he have done to the movies by himself, knowing that she wanted to go so badly? Something stirred inside her, looking for life. She was angry at being awake, at starting to feel jealous, at being worried, at fearing that something had happened to Fernando. And what if someone comes to inform her that he had been in an accident? If he had been run over? If he was dead? No, that couldn’t happen. He was simply going to come home late.

The time passed, dark, slow, charged with bitter thoughts. She felt an irrational fear, distressed. The beginnings of nausea.

Finally, in the empty darkness she heard the key she had imagined so many times.

"How are you? It’s me, don’t be startled. Are you asleep?" Fernando’s voice was trying to be friendly.

Yolanda closed her eyes. She didn’t want him to know she was awake, that she had been awake, suffering. She acted like she was sleeping. She stirred sluggishly under the sheets and mumbled as if still dreaming.

"Mmmm... What time is it? Why did you wake me up?"

"It’s two o’clock. Don’t worry. Everything’s ok. They took me out. Go on sleeping."

Fernando was barely visible in the bedroom. He went into the bathroom and closed the door. She sat up. Now she was wide awake. She turned on the radio again and turned it down as low as it would go.

"4:23."

Why is he lying to me? He said, "It’s two o’clock. Don’t worry." He faked a sweet voice and told an absurd lie.

She wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t know how to explain his lie and there would be a violent argument, unpleasant and with no way out, since his arrival at 4:23 and the lie that it’s 2:00 couldn’t be erased. Those two facts were there, fixed, filling her with rage.

Yes, he’s cheating on me. He’s cheating on me simply and calmly. Why would I have to be the only woman it’s happened to? But I know. I’ve surprised him. He lies to me when he tells me the time and, I’m sure, about many other things. It’s quite easy for him to go out with some slutty secretary while I’m here complaining to myself. It’s not fair. I won’t leave... What do I expect my child to have! After all, that’s the only thing that matters to me now. For the moment, unfortunately, I depend on Fernando for everything, but later I’ll go to my mother’s house, or I’ll work; why wouldn’t I be able to work? Perhaps I could work once my baby grows up a little and goes off to school... He won’t lie to me when I can defend myself. In a little while I’ll be able to go out, too. I’ll see my friends again when I’m thin; I’m certainly going to lose weight later and I’ll go out with my friends. Does he think there aren’t other men besides him? The success I had with his coworkers before really bothered him... Later, yes, later...

She fell asleep again, rancorous, exhausted, full of projects and threats.

Fernando went into the bedroom. He quickly put on his pajamas and got into bed. Yolanda felt her husband’s birdlike heart against her back, beating fast.

Laura’s body is resting on the bed. The cords that have tied her nerves into knots slowly untangle themselves in the darkness of night. They need quiet to untie themselves completely, so Laura’s alert, vibrant will can relax itself and get lost wandering the weblike tunnels of sleep, so it can loosen and stretch the muscles in her face, her chest, her belly, so they forget, so they leave her, finally, in peace. That image of herself that she wants to present to others can disappear, she thinks, let it be erased. Yes, almost asleep. But an insect is buzzing around her, disturbing her.

Laura had believed she would achieve some satisfaction, some peace, even if it were incomplete, for this anxiety, for this desire for Mario that had tormented her for months, and the quick encounters when they were alone before they got married had never satisfied her. But no, Mario doesn’t respond to her slow caresses with she slow skill that she expected. She never got her measure of pleasure, mixed with the marvelous emotion of feeling the touch of his strong, naked legs, touching his tense muscles, seeing his fluttering eyelashes, attached to those perfect eyelids, distracted in caressing his dark back with her fingertip and looking for those tender words that he never, or rarely, let fall from his lips. And when some did escape, were they true? Or were they only provoked by the excitement?

Now, when Mario, exhausted, has fallen asleep, she, her eyes wide open in the darkness, starts to second-guess things and doubts creep in. Is he asleep or only hidden, absent? And... does she want the truth? She hears his deep breathing, the slow breathing of a sleeping man. He sleeps so easily! Without a doubt that lack of interest in her so soon is a sign of the little love he has for her. He had been strong and fast, an enviable lover, surely. But she wanted...

Nevertheless, Mario is there, next to her! Laura, with her lips dry, like wood, kissed him tenderly on the shoulder. Mario is there! That incomplete pleasure didn’t discourage her, but instead added to her desire, her hunger that was never sated.

Then, calm. My reading. The bed like a welcoming cradle. The black abyss that devours Sandra’s head, or Laura’s, or mine, after swallowing that little tranquilizing tablet.

Are they having the wake for Griselda’s father downstairs? There is no sound of weeping, no glimpses of mourning clothes. Maybe Griselda hadn’t wanted to have the wake in the building. No! Don’t let death in the building! So they took him to a suitable funeral parlor where they completed their weeping and said ordained prayers.

Distances are longer at night. At night the city is bigger, it expands, and the houses become isolated. The buildings get taller, solitary. By day the vehicles and the light bring everything closer. At night the darkness isolates, makes everything smaller, keeps us locked up in a crystal box.