My room was so pretty. The one that, when I turned fifteen, my mom had decorated pink, with a mirror-dressing table with lots of little bottles to perfume the occasion. For a month I bragged to my girlfriends at school and my cousins and a few boys who came up to my bedroom just for a moment. The little lamps on the bureaus had pleated rose-pattern shades. The bureaus had white curled feet, and in the drawer with the gold pull was my diary with its little lock, my letters from Lorena and my photos of Robert Redford and Jorge Rivero. I also got hold of one of those forbidden magazines with naked women that made me feel nervous and start to perspire just from seeing them. I had a record player just for me, and my secrets that spun with the invisible grooves. I painted my fingernails several times a day, sitting on the rug with my stack of records lying all around me all out of order.

My dad used to spoil me a lot. He said I was just like his sister Chata, who had died very young. One time he even bought me a piano, because I wanted to learn how to play. The teacher came to the house for three months and the one who learned was my dad, for at night and after a few drinks, I don’t know what of, he used to remember and play very slowly, with a lot of sadness, some Augustin Lara songs.

In any case, my little dad forgot that I was his favourite when Mauricio went to him to complain about me. He had the same critical expression on his face as my husband, and said I was his dead daughter. This really hit me, it knocked me to the floor and I begged him to let me talk to him alone. But Mauricio made fun of me while he was poking me in the legs with the toes of his shoes. Dad didn’t look at me, but his hand was shaking, and I held it tight; he allowed me this last gesture.

I would have liked to confide in him before that, when I used to spend the day watching TV and eating crackers, as if that way I was driving away my fear that Mauricio would come home late again. Because he almost always did, and I would be asleep and everything and once or twice he woke me up to make dinner for him and his friends. I objected one time and he hit me in the face, and he said if he brought home the money it was my duty to do what he told me. I would be very anxious when I made breakfast for the children and sent them off. He would stretch slowly and yell at me to satisfy his morning desires, which for me had become real torture, a pain-ful thing to do, because my vagina was too dry. I would play with the children in the afternoon, and then I could forget about his acne face and his hairy white belly. It almost seems to me then that not everything was a duty.