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called him Diego.
    I lathered all over with soap, trying to change my train of thought: the wedding dress was ironed; the stockings wrapped in tissue; the shoes in the box; the veil pinned to the garland of wax orange blossoms. Papá would pick up the bouquet on his way home from work, and at night he would give me Mamá’s good earrings, the ones he had been saving for my wedding, which I could hardly remember because she had only worn them on important occasions.
    It crossed my mind that it would have been nice if we could have arranged for the portrait. That had been an idea of Papá’s, soon after we arrived in La Boca. Although it sort of embarrassed me at the time, now I was thinking that it would have been nice. Papá had heard of an artist, a fellow named Nicanor Urías, who people said was a magnificent portrait painter, and Papá had got the notion into his head of commissioning him to paint my picture so that my children would always have something to remember their mother by. He never mentioned it, but I always knew how much it pained him not to have so much as a photograph of his own wife, and sometimes I also thought that, with all the money my uncles had squandered in Valencia, we might have commissionedone of my mother when she was young and beautiful, before the illness that finally killed her had aged her prematurely. It could have been hanging in our sitting room right now, and I could have looked at her whenever I was alone in the house, and from her eyes, so sweet, so cheerful, felt that she was still watching over me.
    But like my mother’s portrait, mine was not to be. Papá told me that Urías’ prices were too high and, now that we had to lay on the wedding, we couldn’t afford any more expenses. But the Italian girls told me that the problem wasn’t the money; it was that the artist had a bad reputation. People said he was a bit of a sorcerer, because his mother was a Brazilian witch, and they said his portraits looked so good and so lifelike because when he painted them, he imbued them with a bit of the soul of the person he was painting.
    I found this impossible to believe, and I was very surprised that my father, such a religious and serious man, would think that there could be any truth in it at all. Perhaps it was simply that the painter was a mulatto and Papá preferred not to deal with colored people. Or maybe it was really about the money, because he also went to speak with another artist, someone named Quinquela Martín, who was painting portraits of people in the district for an exhibition he was putting together, and he came back saying the same thing, that for the time being we had to think about the wedding preparations, and that later on we would see.
    I don’t know why, but that day, while I was getting ready, all I could think about were things that could never be, while the thingsthat really were possible, that were necessarily going to happen, slipped like soap through my fingers.
    I washed my hair carefully, rinsed it out with a bit of vinegar to bring out the shine, and let it lie loose on my back to dry while I combed it. Then I put on the cream, skipping my back because I didn’t want my hair to get greasy again, and opened the violet cologne, which reminded me of my mother and of Valencia.
    It was only then that I remembered I would have to spend the rest of the day in the kitchen baking the tarts, fairy cakes and rolls. I burst out laughing at the image of how sweaty I’d be all over again by nightfall, after hours at the oven. But at least my hair would be clean, and I could always take another quick dip in the tub, unless it occurred to my fiancé to come and visit us after supper.
    What, I wondered, was he doing just then? Bathing like me, getting ready for his wedding night? Or out with his friends, taking leave of his bachelor life, swilling cane liquor in some tavern? And the other man. What was that man doing