HELENA’S STREET LOOKED like the Song of Songs, lined with fruits fallen from the trees. In the shade of the walls cats were resting, their eyes gummy, diseased, tongues out, long back legs pretentiously splayed as if they were posing for a photograph. Figs split open in the sun, revealing their red, sticky flesh.

We ate our breakfast in the garden, at the stone table underneath a pergola that Helena had built, or, rather, that she’d had built, many years ago. This garden had shade in the mornings, in between Helena’s house and the neighboring house, which was empty, and a low iron fence bordering a small dark alley where nobody ever walked. The fence was older than the building, constructed in the postwar period. It hailed from the city’s infancy in the mid-nineteenth century, it wasn’t anything complex, an S-shaped pattern; at some point it had been painted pale blue but it had rusted over now, and Helena liked it in that state: it provided a bit of aura, that’s the word she used.

The garden’s location, the shade and the empty house, made it seem like a secret. We ate yogurt from single-serving containers with honey; flies flocked to the torn foil, attracted by the thin layer that stuck to it. We drank cloudy coffee, Olga drank orange juice from a big glass. No pulp. As time passed the sun found its way through the leaves over the table and Olga left. She was always the first to leave.

On the very first morning we sat down at the table in the seats we would continue to use for the rest of our time there: Helena and Olga with their backs against the house, me across from them. The first morning I came into the garden from the kitchen and Olga was there alone. I remember experiencing this as vaguely embarrassing, uncomfortable: I didn’t want to be alone with her; I’d have preferred if she wasn’t there at all. When I sat down I took the chair across from her since it made the most sense. When Helena joined us soon thereafter she sat down next to Olga, not me. I didn’t know if they always sat like that, with the mute facade next door as their view, but it seemed unlikely that they did. In other words, I’d replaced one of them, I’d taken someone’s spot. I didn’t know whose.