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    It’s nine o’clock, and the doors of the Michi Panero School are opening. Alex walks through one of the mobs of students stampeding toward the main entrance. If only he’d be lucky enough to meet Tiffany taking her little boy to nursery school! That would save him half the trip.
    Epi’s brother wonders what’s passing through Epi’s mind right about now while he, Alex, slips though the multitude of kids without taking the trouble to notice whom he’s pushing or where he’s putting his feet. Up until now, he hasn’t asked himself why his brother has chosen to fuck up his life the way he has. On the other hand, he probably hasn’t wondered about that because the answer seems so obvious. Therefore, it’s more than possible that Epi’s with Tiffany, or that at least he’s contacted her.
    Alex turns left at the next corner, enters a pedestrian zone, dodges a van, and reaches the girl’s street. He hopes she’s still living with her mother, but the truth is that he’s hardly seen her in the past few months, not since Tanveer got out of jail. Everybody assumed she’d go back to him, and as Epi grew increasingly embittered and bad-tempered, he only confirmed that assumption.
    Tiffany Brisette and her son live with Doña Fortu, her mother, and Jamelia, her older sister. The girls’ parents are separated,in part thanks to some maneuvers by Tiffany that have never been clarified. The whole episode served to reaffirm Tiffany Brisette’s ascendancy in the home, especially over her mother. The end result, however, also entailed the defeat of her sister, a sad, slow-witted girl who arrived that way on the plane from Peru; always dressed in grandmotherly clothes, always clinging to her mother’s everlasting arm, she was addicted to Oreo cookies and the songs of Luis Miguel.
    Doña Fortu’s obsession with extravagant names seemed to have infected Tiffany like a sickness, for she had named her son—she was a single mother—Percy José. As if a name were something more than a name. As if it were a kind of magic spell with which you summon the future to play and you win the hand. The years to come may bring all that’s good, luxurious, and exotic to someone named Tiffany Brisette, but what can they bring to girls named Pilar or Amparo? Maybe that wasn’t it; maybe Doña Fortu’s penchant for fancy names was just a roundabout way of taking a special sort of revenge. Having probably read books doesn’t give you the right to name your daughter Fortunata Jacinta, as Doña Fortu’s mother had done. * Nonetheless, it’s more than possible that Doña Fortu harbored hopes for her arrival in Benito Pérez Galdós’s homeland, hopes that her mere name would immediately cause the Spanish to consider her an extremely cultured distant cousin.
    But obviously, that wasn’t what happened. She looked like an Indian, in Peru she’d been poorer than the rats, and nobody in the barrio was going to waste time with realistic novels. And so, as soon as she set foot there, Doña Fortu secured a position as something like a character out of a child’s comic book, an object of pure mockery, a figure very far from the one in her illusions.
    Her home was a disaster in spite of, or because of, her attempts to make it the opposite. She spent money she didn’t have, she waited for what never arrived, and she had no trace of an education. All this drove Tiffany to desperation. During the periods when circumstances obliged her to stay under her mother’s roof, dealing with the girl was impossible. She turned into an unpredictable, irritating creature. Without notice, she’d disappear for weeks or months, leaving her son with Grandmother Fortu and Aunt Jamelia, only to reappear like a biblical plague, tormented by remorse and bad luck.
    At one end of the street there’s a financial institution, at the other a bar, and more or less in the middle, number 36. Alex is almost certain that the apartment’s on the fourth floor, letter A or