After we escaped from that house in Mirandela, Antonio’s mother says, your father would drive by our new apartment, and if he didn’t see your uncle Lucho’s jeep outside, he would ring the doorbell and try to force himself inside, yelling, with the authority he thought he had as a man, you are my wife, these are my children, and on one occasion, when the two of you went with him, that was so ignorant of me, Antonio, that was a mistake, Estela has to come with me because she’s my daughter, he would say, and still, I shouldn’t have allowed it, but, well, she’d told me what had happened with your father, and since the psychiatrist had said there was no information and I didn’t want to probe her too much on whether it was true or not, I protected her though, we are leaving this house, I said, I protected both of you, because you were just as impacted as she was by his screams and his violence, and so on one occasion when we were already living in our new apartment, he came to see both of you — my father reading stories to my sister and me in the living room in that apartment is that memory possible? — yes, no — and he took both of you for the first time, and when your sister came back home she was crying and trembling and she said I don’t want to go with that man ever again, Mom, I am afraid of him, and so then she told me he’d slapped her and she had tried to throw herself out of the car, but Estelita something could have happened to you why would you do something like that, because he said he was going to kill both of us so I screamed no, no, and he said he was going to smash the car against a wall, you don’t remember, no I don’t remember, Antonio says, you were probably in the back seat, I am not leaving you with your mother, he’d said, we are all going to die together, and he began to accelerate his car, and that’s when Estela started crying and screaming and he slapped her face, and so she opened the door and tried to throw herself out, and with me she felt the same way, Antonio, when I would drive her to work on the freeway in Baltimore, and here Antonio pauses the recording, unable to continue, closing his eyes and thinking of his sister’s trajectory since she left Colombia when she was eighteen (studying actuarial science at the University of North Carolina, working as a Senior Actuarial Associate in Charlotte, Mexico City, Baltimore, visiting him in Los Angeles for his twenty-seventh birthday, buying a house, crashing her car on the freeway one rainy evening on her way back from work, soon after grandfather Víctor passed away — your sister always felt your grandfather was the only one in the family who supported her, Antonio —), and as Antonio takes inventory of how little he knows about his sister’s adult life, he wonders if, just as his sister buried what had happened to her, he has buried her along with what happened to her, and if this was the case — of course this is the case how else do you expect me to function day after day? — how can he expect himself to help his sister, or rather, sure, he can expect himself to be a decent human being and help his sister, but then (and here he sees himself driving a truck at night and falling asleep at the wheel after hours of driving and then awakening in a sunny garden — wake up, Antonio —) his habit of burying her would take over and he would bury her and her troubles, wake up, Tata, but perhaps listening to these recordings of his mother every morning is his way to remain alert to his sister’s misfortunes — how are we to remain awake to the misfortunates of the world without sinking ourselves? — and so Antonio opens his eyes and rewinds his mother’s recording and she’s saying with me she felt the same way, Antonio, when I would drive her to work on the freeway in Baltimore, and she would tell me Mom you’re driving too fast, I am not driving that fast, Estelita, no Mom too fast, stop, stop, I can’t stop here we’re on the freeway, I’m going to jump out of the car, calm down, please, we’re getting off the freeway right now, when was this, Antonio says, when she had already had that incident with her neighbors and she was arrested for the first time, when I stayed for months with her in her house in Baltimore and I would drive her to work using only city streets, she couldn’t handle the speed of the freeway, Antonio, and that day I had told her look, there isn’t that much traffic on the freeway, we’ll get there faster, but then unfortunately we hit a zone where cars were racing by and I had to follow the speed of the other cars, and that’s when she became desperate, I had to grab her and say no, no, no, Estela, you’re staying in the car, we are going to get off the freeway right now, and so from then on we only drove on city streets, and so in retrospect I can of course see that she was reliving the trauma that she had lived through with your father, and that the magnitude of what had happened that night in Baltimore with her neighbors, the violence of it all, because one of the women who accused her had tried to run her over, and she wasn’t able to defend herself, Antonio, and the cops treated your sister like a criminal, handcuffing her while searching her house for weapons, and so this precipitated a return of those events of abuse and aggression that she had buried for years, and when she told me what happened with your father on that occasion that the two of you went with him in his car for the first time, I told him over my dead body you take the girl with you ever again, you don’t take them out, either of them, but he tried through the law to take you with him, because he was embarrassed that if neither of his children wanted to see him what he’d done to your sister might go public, and so he was able to find a way through the law, but I would always ask you what happened, did anything happen, is everything okay, and I think that one time that he kicked you in your grandmother’s house, because you didn’t want to pray the rosary or something like that, you were already fourteen, that’s when you told me I don’t want to go with that man anymore, Mom, and he became furious, I am sorry, I said, if you mistreat him I don’t have to support you taking him with you, the day he wants to go with you, he can go if he wants, and so there was a time when you didn’t want to see your father because things like this had happened.