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intruder—the one who’d bent her over the old bathtub in that unfamiliar bathroom and stripped off her clothes—for that man who appeared when she was sleeping and heard noises, bells, moans that she was sure were coming from the closet, from the box she’d hidden behind all of her clothes.

THE RECIPIENT
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  August 10 th
    I’m so tired. I woke up with the sensation of having not slept at all, of having traveled thousands of miles during the night. And in the mirror, my face wasn’t great either: two puffy circles around my eyes ordered me back to bed, but I was already standing, I had to go to class. The images from my dream would’ve kept me from shutting my eyes again anyway. I took a shower.
    I dreamed, like I never do, all night. If I wanted, I could enumerate all the stages of this exhausting dream, this long and vivid dream. I know that Alicia, making fun of everything as usual, accompanied me to a room in my old and unfamiliar country house in Rancagua, that she played dolls with my little sisters (affecting voices, inventing frivolous plots: Barbie goes to the salon and some strange stuffed elves give her a new hairdo while gossiping about other toys, laughing at a headless Playmobil); that she slept in the same room as me, in another bed or in a sleeping bag on the floor, like a childhood sleepover: we turned off the light and talked for a while, but fell asleep in the middle of an important conversation (maybe just when I asked her who sheliked, whether or not I was the one she loved?). Another time she went to school with me, we skipped class and went to talk on the far side of the playground. I didn’t know it, but she was following every move I made and every word I said, in the afternoon she showed me a garish comic strip she’d drawn that featured me. A synopsis of my day in vignettes, something like that. I never got bored of her, nor she of me: the same old story. Then suddenly, Alicia disappears.
    I’m in a corridor in the big house that belonged to my uncle. Near Coya, down a busy, unpaved road, any local can tell you the way if you ask. A fantasy house, immense and silent, accessed through an electronic gate, a fountain and gravel parking area appear. (Being very young, I didn’t get why they covered the ground with sharp little rocks, particularly when we ran barefoot across it on our way to swim in the pool.) A fantasy house, as I said, that often appears in my nightmares along with that other house, the wood cabin on the shore of some southern beach where I’ve never been, an invention where J liked to predict that she and I would someday live.
    I found myself in my uncle’s house, sitting on the parquet of a long corridor, that echoing corridor where, when we stayed overnight, the great thrill was to jump out at someone at the last second without them noticing your approach in the darkness. And the silence of that house. It still disconcerts me every time I see (or better, admire) the four people who live in that place, forced to live with the knowledge that, day after day, there’s no one lying in any of the beds in any of the ten or twelve bedrooms, that the soap in all seven of the bathrooms remains unused, the showers clean, but rusty. The emptiness in that house becomes unbearable,and so the birthdays and Christmases that my family celebrates there are competitive displays of affection and camaraderie, to fill the silence between conversations. And, because there’s something terrifying about letting them trail off, the conversations become banal, then personal, repetitive, uncomfortable, then banal again, an uncle, an aunt, a great aunt, and another uncle think they’ve been talking to me, but we just make sounds with our mouths and we keep on like that, not hearing one another, until they get in their car and go back to Santiago in silence, immediately turning on the radio—music