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out of her profession, she was free to bring the song lyrics into her private life. She realized, with bitter surprise, that the bolero was the truth. In the cabaret, she had sung what she hadn’t lived: the temptation of evil. Now, in her home, the lyrics returned almost like something imposed, a law. Say it isn’t true, Elvira. Say I didn’t fall in love with you because of a secret despair, that I didn’t transform the ringing of wedding bells into a prelude to an emptiness so profound that only a poor tyranny over the house can fill it. Giving orders. Being obeyed. Never being dominated. Hiding her probable melancholy. Burying her unwanted restlessness. Devising matrimonial strategies so he would never say what she feared most: “We’re not the way we used to be.” He never said it. They went to bars with the illusion that there was never any “used to” but always nothing except “right now.” She always sang, and he knew where to find her. Always. She wouldn’t leave. “You have an exciting voice.” Mustache. Sideburns. Incipient baldness. Attributes of a macho. “Thank you, Señor.” She did have an exciting voice as a singer, that’s true. As a woman and mother, she felt her sentimental voice gradually turning into something else difficult to describe aloud. In her heart, she perhaps could tell herself—dancing very close to her past, present, for always lover, her man, Pastor Pagán—that instead of the woman’s martyrdom typical of the bolero, she now felt tempted to identify with the wife and mother who gives orders, however small they may be. And who is obeyed. This causes melancholy and agitation in Elvira Morales. She cannot understand why she doesn’t accept the simple tranquility of her home or rather, even if she does accept it, why she feels attracted to the misfortune at the heart of the song, though when you sing it, there’s no need to live it, and when you stop singing it, you fall into the trap of giving it life. “I don’t recognize myself,” Elvira whispers in Pastor’s ear when they dance together in the club. She doesn’t go on. She suspects he wouldn’t understand, and neither would anyone else. She would never say: “I regret it. I should have continued with my singing career.” And neither would she say something as melodramatic as: “A mother and wife needs to be worshiped.” She would never say a thing like that. She preferred, now and then, to declare her love. To her husband, her children, Alma and Abel. Her children didn’t return the favor. In the shrug of their shoulders, in their cold eyes, she recognized that all of a mother’s sentimental baggage seemed despicable to her children. For them, the bolero was ridiculous. But for Pastor, the music was just what it should be. The key to happiness. The prologue to the feeling, if not the feeling itself. Something overly sweet. Strange but overly sweet. Dancing in the half-light of romantic dance halls (there were still a few left), Elvira realized that what her children rejected in her was exactly what she rejected in her husband. The dreadful mawkishness of a world that decks itself out in colored spheres, as brittle and hollow as the balls on a Christmas tree. Was it necessary to elevate like a profane Eucharist one’s cheap and overly sentimental innermost feelings in order to disguise the lack of emotion in daily life, the absence of seriousness in the eternal disorder that affirms us in the face of the void, that distances us from everyone—from other people and from ourselves? Elvira Morales dances with her arms around her husband, and Pastor Pagán says into her ear, “How long are we going to pretend we’re still young? How long are we going to admit that our children threaten us? That they annihilate us little by little.” When she married, she thought: I can turn him down. But only now. Later, I won’t have that freedom. And before returning to the everyday schedule, the customary obligations,