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continued to watch him from afar, she never lurked behind any more, hoping to be invited to stay, when he was the one seated on the guest sofa. But not even Brother José, in his food-stained habit, a rough cord tied round his waist and wooden rosary bumping against his thigh, was as dark a man as Arcadio Gómez Gómez, her father, a solitary figure at the other end of the spectrum from the pearly sheen of the gentlemen, a denizen of the margin where grey merged dangerously into black.
     
    Every Sunday at midday, her father would be waiting by the front door. He never missed their appointment and he was never late.Winter or summer, rain or shine, he was always there, leaning against the same tree, when she returned with her godmother from eleven o’clock Mass. As they turned the corner, they could see his grey, opaque form, a grotesque mistake in these elegant surroundings, an image cut from an old photograph, flat and dull, and set down at random in front of the majestic front door. Arcadio Gómez Gómez was a shadow at the center of a world that ignored him.When Sara and her godmother first caught sight of his figure, they became nervous. He quickly removed his hat and squeezed it without realizing what he was doing, shuffling sideways, measuring the width of the pavement with his feet, three or four steps in one direction, three or four in the other, still looking at them both but not daring to come any closer. Instead, Doña Sara would stop dead and search her bag for a cigarette with her right hand, still gripping the little girl’s hand firmly with her left. It was as if she couldn’t face this defenseless man without the comfort of a cigarette. Young Sara was divided between her own anxiety, which made her glance around to make sure none of her schoolmates were nearby, and the fear emanating from both adults, the mysterious tremor she detected in her godmother and the uneasiness of her father as he tugged repeatedly at his shirt collar. In those days, when she was eight or nine, she never wondered exactly what it was that she felt every Sunday morning. She was an unusual child, she always had been, she couldn’t know how much she had gained and how much she had lost when she was allotted a destiny that didn’t belong to her.
     
    “There he is again . . .” Having consumed half her cigarette in three or four greedy drags, Doña Sara barely disguised her displeasure. “I’ve told your mother, let her come to fetch you, not him, I really can’t bear that terrible man. She pays absolutely no attention to me. Every week, I have to put up with the sight of him standing there, damn him. Really! The things one has to endure.”
     
    Sara didn’t like her godmother talking like this, breaking her own rules with a vehemence that was disconcerting. At the house in Calle Velázquez, nobody ever mentioned Sara’s parents, whether to speak ill or well of them.When the lady of the house referred to the child’s mother she used her Christian name, as if she were merely an acquaintance—“Years ago Sebastiana washed a pair of curtains like these and she ruined them; Sebastiana used to cook a delicious roast chicken; Sebastiana used to clean windows with water and bleach and despite the smell, they were marvelous,” and so on. When her god-daughter came back on Sunday afternoons, Doña Sara never asked the girl if she’d had a good time or if they’d gone for a walk or had a nice lunch—the smiling interrogation she always subjected the child to when she got back from a birthday party or a school outing.Those hours remained outside time, suspended inside a parenthesis of silence, detached from a reality that paused at midday on Sunday and recommenced eight hours later with a bath, supper, and prayers, just like every other night.These were the rules that governed young Sara’s life, strict and immutable except on the days when she returned from eleven o’clock Mass, in the hundred meters of pavement that seemed to