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and you’re not wearing your heels,” my mother consoled me, but I noticed she was observing me with a worried look. When I say it was hard work to grow, I am not speaking metaphorically; they tried everything possible to make me taller, except hormones. When I was young they were still experimental, and Benjamin Viel, our family physician and my mother’s enduring Platonic love, was afraid I would grow a mustache—although a mustache wouldn’t have been all that bad, you can always shave it off. Instead, for years I went to a gym where they suspended me from a system of cords and poles in the hope that gravity would stretch my skeleton. In my nightmares, I see myself hanging upside down by my ankles, but my mother swears that is pure fantasy, I never experienced anything that cruel. I was suspended by my neck, using an apparatus that prevented instantaneous death by hanging. The torment was for naught, however; all it did was lengthen my neck. The first school I attended was run by German nuns, but I didn’t last long there. I was expelled at the age of six for perversion, having organized a contest to show off our underpants, although the true reason may have been that my mother had scandalized a prudish Santiago society by not having a husband. From the nuns, I went to a more understanding English school, where such underwear exhibitions had little consequence as long as they were performed discreetly. I am sure that my childhood would have been different had Memé lived longer. My grandmother was training me to be an Illuminata; the first words she taught me were in Esperanto, an unpronounceable mishmash she expected to be the universal language of the future, and I was still in diapers when she first sat me down at the table of the spirits. All those splendid possibilities ended with her death. Our family home, a delight when she was presiding over it with her gatherings of intellectuals, Bohemians, and lunatics, became at her death a cheerless and empty place populated only by currents of air. Smells from that time endure in my memory: paraffin stoves in the winter and burnt sugar in summer, when a huge bonfire was lighted in the patio to make blackberry jam in a gigantic copper kettle. After my grandmother died, no birds sang in the cages, no more sonatas were played on the piano, all the plants and flowers withered and died, the cats escaped to run wild on the rooftops, and one by one all the other domestic animals perished: the rabbits and hens ended up in stews, and the nanny goat got out in the street one day and was run over by the milkman’s cart. The only survivor was the dog, Pelvina López-Pun, dozing beside the drapes that divided the drawing room from the dining room. I wandered among heavy Spanish furniture, marble statues, and pastoral paintings, calling my grandmother’s name, seeking her among the piles of books that filled every corner and reproduced at night in an uncontrollable orgy of printed paper. A tacit boundary divided the part of the house occupied by the family from the kitchen, patios, and servants’ quarters where I spent most of my life. Theirs was a badly ventilated, dark subworld of rooms furnished only with a cot, a chair, and a rickety chest of drawers, and decorated with calendars and color prints of saints. That was the sole refuge of those women who labored from sunup to sundown, the first to get up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night, after serving dinner and cleaning up the kitchen. They were free every other Sunday. I don’t remember their ever having a family or taking a vacation. They grew old serving, and died in our house. Once a month a large, slightly dim-witted man came to wax the floors. He strapped steel wool on his feet and danced around in a pathetic samba, scrubbing the parquet clean; then on hands and knees he applied wax with a rag, and finished with a stout brush to bring the wax to a high shine. The laundress