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that people learn from their parents, ready to fling counterfeit faces in my direction to see if I would be able to decipher them. The instinctive hatred of plastic surgeons—the worst of the lot, because they do not even respect the outer trimmings, because all their efforts are made in order to suppress a revelation. Not that the others are any better, with their god of pills, their smell like a pharmacist’s thumbs, believing that they can sound out what moves slowly in our depths, inserting their instruments into the mouth and beyond the asshole and under the fingernails, into the swamp of a heart we have each inherited. Cleavers that open you as if you were a can of food. To open, to open, to make you bleed, to enter and then—what? Then, nothing. Then they proclaim that they have discovered what is corrupting us, when they are the ones responsible for having made us sick in the first place. That’s their strategy—to make people suffer, just as Enriqueta was now making the doll suffer, in order to explore a sickness that was no more real than the one I had feigned, and all so that the patients would be grateful. A smile from the doll, because Enriqueta’s left hand was now beginning to give comfort for what her own right hand had been visiting upon it.
    Enriqueta sang to the doll in a throaty voice. I allowed something inside me to feel—perhaps for the last time—devastated by the promise of tenderness, the illusion that she would hum this to a child of mine or, better still, directly to me. That zone inside me that listened to the song, was that the section of my being, the clefts of my eyes, that could recognize the seductive force of music, that had the capacity to listen to melodies, but that later on began to close down on me? How can I know? It may be possible that the lullaby of a woman like Enriqueta could have awoken those sounds in my optic nerves. If so, what my eyes witnessed immediately cut off that possibility forever: Enriqueta began to feed the doll with a bottle. The substance inside was wormlike and white, as if someone had mixed dust, lime, even some milk. She poured it into the doll’s mouth and lifted its dress and took off its underpants. Then I saw how she sat it down on a tiny mock toilet seat.
    And then I realized why Enriqueta was taking my drawings home. I knew it before I had to watch how the flow of that liquid mix tapered from the doll’s meager underbelly, I knew it before I had to see the hand of the woman whom I had just been dreaming of as my mate for life snake toward the stock of drawings and … It wasn’t that she used my homages to her as toilet paper. If she had used them for her own rivulets and apertures, I might have convinced myself that she was attempting at least some form of intimacy. But the doll. I swore that one day I would … I would what? What would I do to her? What would I do with my life?
    Of the years that followed, Doctor, the six, seven years that followed, I do not even want to evoke a memory. If I had been able to brand that doll’s dirty bottom forever in my mind, if I had been able to bring it to my eyes without time’s destroying it, as it destroys and menstruates everything, if I could have kept intact that pure implacable flame of hatred I felt … Memory is always a fraud—erased, manipulated, sweetened by somebody, somebody always swearing it was some other way until you are not sure yourself. The past is like one of those faces captured by hands such as yours, Doctor—always subject to alterations. Standing in front of adults, how many times had I desired to return to the past, where I had been so humiliated, to prove to myself that my resentment was no fantasy. It was impossible to go back, impossible to freemyself from those older people. Instead, I had to submit, I had to cast down my discolored eyes. Equally impossible, I thought, to bring that piece of the past to my own present. If I could have done that, a girl like