From Tuesday to Saturday, her alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m.; Mondays, she gets an extra thirty, forty minutes, since she and Teresa have been in over the weekend to empty the garbage bins and air out the offices. Some days, if the weather is good—if it’s not raining, if the cold is still bearable—she leaves home a little early and takes the bus, even though it means buying another ticket. She changes lines at Atocha and enjoys looking out at the different cities that exist within the same city. Russian dolls: more than neighborhoods, cities within cities within cities, houses and streets inside the belly of the same whale. María thinks about the older buildings in her neighborhood, and also about the new ones, four or five stories tall, with identical redbrick facades and patterned awnings, extending toward the sky once the bus is on the other side of the river and heading for the train station. She thinks about the first association meetings Pedro invited her to, about his friends and the others demanding the neighborhood be cleaned up, that it become, they insisted, “dignified.” What kind of a view are we getting, they wondered: the jail, the shantytowns, the empty lots; and María thought for the first time about the way people described the streets where she’d lived. When you cross the Manzanares on your way to the city center, the buildings become more polished, the past alternates with the future. She thinks about her first weeks in Madrid, when the metro went only as far as Oporto and she walked from there to her aunt and uncle’s place, and she thinks of the times when she got the lines mixed up, that time she ended up in Alfonso XIII and had so much trouble finding her way back home. Now she works in Nuevos Ministerios, and she takes the metro straight there if she’s in a hurry. Since in that case her only view is of her fellow passengers’ faces, she uses the time to read: Laura, Conchita’s daughter, lends her lots of books and encourages her to join groups where she can discuss the things she cares about, the things Loli and Conchita care about, but surrounded by other women. I tried to get my mom to go, Laura tells her, but there’s no way. Not for María, either: she worries they’ll think she’s strange, or, worse, they’ll make fun of her ignorance. As if the instant she opened her mouth, they’d know all about her, where she was from, how much money she made, and she would realize, with all those women watching, that her opinion wasn’t worth very much. Most of the books Laura lends her she’s read about or heard about on the radio; every time Laura calls to tell her she’ll be coming by the next afternoon, María feels conflicted. She appreciates Laura’s efforts, that instead of staying at the library or having a drink with her friends, she goes over to María’s, but she has the feeling she’s becoming a kind of lab rat: María, the single, daughterless mother, the socially conscious office cleaner, educated by Laura, daughter of Domingo and Conchita, construction worker and housewife, the first in her family to set foot inside a university. She thought maybe Laura pitied her, or maybe she was trying to clear her conscience: every scholarship she got, every course she passed, took her farther and farther away from the neighborhood. Maybe she hoped that seeing María would anchor her in her surroundings—the place where she belonged, the place she was escaping from, though not without remorse—or that María would grab her by the ankles so she couldn’t take off. What a sweet little fable.
She and Teresa split the offices, and María looks them all over before the managers clock in; later on—when they’ve started up with the typewriters and meetings, and the news is on in the background—they take care of the common areas. She likes working with Teresa, because they have a way of chatting that doesn’t spill over into prying: sometimes she’ll mention Pedro or her conversations with Chico, but she avoids talking about Carmen; she knows Teresa was born in a village in Granada, that she lives in Colmenar, and that she’s getting married for the second time in February, though she thinks it’s a horrible month. María also likes to work. When the metro passes through Sainz de Baranda and Conde de Casal, she overhears other women complaining about the smell of the floor cleaner, the cracks in their hands; her hands hurt, too, but she takes a certain pride in the cleanliness. Over time, she has learned to appreciate her role: tidying up that which others make a mess of. She likes lifting stains from the carpet, likes to see more light filtering in through the windows. It makes her feel useful, and she’s good at it. She likes what her hands make possible, and she likes repeating the same routine, moving from cubicle to cubicle with a calm mind; sometimes she observes how the foam sprouts up from the water’s surface, or the very fine trace left behind when the bleach dissolves. She appreciates it if they thank her, though she knows she’s invisible to most of them. Who pays attention to the woman’s body broadening each year, two arms and two legs and a face, reduced to a uniform? She doesn’t need anyone to feel good about what she does, just herself. Occasionally, the company calls and asks her to cover for someone and work a double shift, or do a demonstration for a new client. She always says yes, because it’s not easy to cover the rent and the rest of the bills all on her own, and still have some left to save. Every month, she has less to send Carmen; her mother reproaches her for it, she can’t get by on the widow’s pension alone, and she suspects that Chico—his hair getting dark, two heads taller than her by now—helps out as much as he can, after his expenses. If that doesn’t happen, if she doesn’t have to go to some office building in García Noblejas, she sticks to her routine: meets up with Loli and Conchita, or goes to one of Pedro’s meetings at the association, and if the feeling takes her, joins them for beers afterward. His friends are now used to her presence, and occasionally, Alfonso will bring his wife along, too. Unless that happens, María keeps quiet, and then—with another woman there—she slips into the expected role: anecdotes about child-rearing and motherhood, kitchen secrets, and beauty tips. Saturday afternoons, she saves for herself, and sometimes she goes for a walk in the city center, or stays at home just reading. On Sundays, María eats lunch with Pedro: usually at her place, the two of them, or with her cousin and her husband; sometimes at Pedro’s, with his mom and his brother, though María finds the atmosphere there depressing, and tends to find ways of getting out of it. After lunch, they have sex, then they watch TV or talk for a while—he usually circles back to conversations from the meetings, so María can have her say, even if only with him—and not long after that, he goes home to make dinner. Neither has ever suggested any variation: María knows that Pedro answers first to his father, who is dead, then to his mother, still alive, and finally, to the brother a few years younger than him, and she also knows that she’s unwilling to care for any of them, so they keep their own apartments and try to see each other at least a few times a week. Some of his friends call them “the modern couple.” María gets up early every day, except some Sundays. It has been that way for years, ever since the cleaning company hired her, ever since she met Pedro, and she’s happy in her apartment with a living room, a bedroom, and a balcony, looking out over a street that will end in another street that will end in another street.
When the phone rings the first time, she’ll tell him not to pick up; to stay where he is, naked, lying on his stomach. She has only known two bodies in this way, Pedro’s, and Carmen’s father’s, and she’s used to Pedro’s by now: if he were ever to crash his motorcycle in the square, if they were to ask her to identify the body, María has memorized the location of every freckle, every birthmark. A dark-brown circle in the middle of his right thigh, three freckles on his left hamstring. She looks at them while saying, If it’s me they’re calling, and even I don’t care about picking up, neither should you. Chico knows about Pedro, and Pedro knows about Carmen, Chico, Soledad, her mother, and her older siblings; but María doesn’t see why they should know those respective faces or voices, let alone meet in person, so when the phone rings and Pedro gives her that look, it throws her. María can’t be sure, but she guesses it’s Chico: Sunday nights, she talks with her daughter, some Sunday afternoons her brother calls when he gets home from work, but there are times when she doesn’t feel like picking up and only answers later on when he calls again. It doesn’t bother Chico, nothing can ever puncture his good spirits. Still, María starts to worry when the phone rings again—after just enough time to hang up and redial—and Pedro jumps out of bed. A few steps and he picks up in the living room.
In bed, after the ringing stops but before Pedro starts talking, María thinks about how happy the weekend has been; maybe today’s been just like any other Sunday, but yesterday, certainly. On Saturday, she got home at the same time as always, made a meal for herself, in no hurry—grilled fish, a salad, some fruit—and had a short siesta on the sofa, twenty minutes or so. She took her time getting ready: a bath, a pretty dress—it would have been better to save it for today, so Pedro could have remarked on the color, the cut of the fabric—the makeup the way she’s been doing it for the last few years, darkened eyebrows, red lips. She took the metro to Callao and walked from cinema to cinema along Gran Vía, but none of the films they were showing appealed; she crossed the Plaza de España and walked to Rosales. She had already seen something by that director, maybe at one of the association’s screenings, or on a visit to Chico’s. She never invited anyone, because she knew they wouldn’t be interested, and she didn’t want them to find out she went alone either—they might feel sorry for her, or worry—so if they asked her about her day, she made something up. She didn’t find the film all that exciting: faced with the stories other people thought up, she never took long to notice the seams, an inconsistent attitude, a plot that didn’t develop the same way it would in real life.
“It’s José María, your brother.”
Chico, she thought while she looked for a nightshirt or a dress to cover up with, as if her brother could sense that she was naked two hundred miles away. Her little brother was born on the nineteenth of March, and they decided to name him José for that day’s saint—although it was also her older brother’s name—and the María was for her, his godmother.
“I went to a movie yesterday, Chico. I didn’t like it that much. Fanny and Alexander, it was called. I had a hard time believing that all those things could happen to one person. Like when you’re reading a novel, and the protagonist has the worst luck, so you’ll like them more. That’s not how life works. Sure, you get your fair share of tragedies, from the time you’re born to the time you die. That’s the way it goes. Something bad happens to you, and not long after, there’s something good to make up for it. I was thinking about it on my way back, on the metro. I went through all that stuff with Carmen, but now I’m okay, I’ve come to terms with it. That’s how it goes, right? And now that I’m talking to you about it, I’m thinking it almost seems like people need that kind of tragedy, because otherwise, they’d have no stories to tell.”
“Who did you go with? Did Pedro take you?”
“No, he didn’t. I went with my friend’s daughter Laura. The one who’s in college.”
“How are you doing otherwise, María?”
“Fine, same as ever. No news this week: with work, I’ve hardly gone out. And it’s Sunday, so Pedro’s here, and tonight I’ll call Mom and talk to Carmen. What about you?”
“Fine, fine. This week has been a little strange. Listen, María. I’m going to put someone on who’s got something to tell you. We’ll talk later.”
She keeps all the pictures of her daughter in a box, but the last few months, she’s gotten into the habit of pulling out one that Chico took on a recent trip to the beach. One of their older nephews had offered to drive them to the coast. Carmen, Chico, and her mother got up early and rented a couple of sun loungers at a snack bar in Fuengirola; the four of them took turns sitting in them all day. Chico decided to splurge and reserve a table. They put away the sandwiches Carmen had made and ate fried fish, tomato picadillo by the spoonful, and bread soaked in oil. Her mother had agreed to get her feet wet, and the nephew had taught Carmen to swim, or at least tried to get her to wade out as far as she safely could. At six o’clock, so they could make it before dark, they went home. Soledad was sorry she hadn’t gone, and it was days before she got over it.
A few weeks later, María visited on her time off, and Chico told her about it and showed her the pictures he’d taken. Her mother in a loose-fitting floral dress, under the straw umbrella; her nephew showing his broken front tooth, at ease with the imperfection, putting one arm around his grandmother or licking the sardine oil from his fingers. A clumsy photo of Chico, taken by Carmen: her brother is already a man, almost thirty years old, and he crosses his arms over his chest to hide the fat that has been accumulating there; her daughter has cut him off at the knees. Chico is a mystery to María; he spends all his free time at the cinema, or—in the last year, year and a half—taking photos. Their mother scolds him for having the taste of a prince, and he doesn’t argue; he spends more than he’d like having film developed or buying movie tickets. Over time, María has learned to respect his happiness, though she doesn’t understand it.
There are more photos of Carmen from that day than of anyone else. Carmen and her cousin on the beach; Carmen drying off with a towel, in the shadow cast by the sun lounger; Carmen making a face at her uncle, maybe because she wants him to stop taking pictures: she holds up her left hand and shows her teeth, mouthing some reproach. In that photo, and the ones that come after—Carmen kneeling in the sand, saying something to her grandmother, or Carmen walking along the shore by herself; María likes the candid ones best—Carmen has become a young woman. María gets the sense that the look on her face, that furious wish to remain unobserved, means her daughter has exited childhood but not yet crossed into adolescence. She flips back several images: even in those last few, Carmen’s face seems to have hardened, her hips have widened, and her chest has filled out. In her eyes, which never had much of a spark, were never really childlike, bitterness is stirring.
Ever since someone asked about her daughter in a bar a few years ago—a stranger one night—and she lied about Carmen’s age so as not to reveal how young she’d been when she had her, and she didn’t describe her, because she knew she had her father’s small, dark eyes, but she didn’t know the shape of her face or if she preferred her hair up or down, María has started going to the box of photos from time to time—in the living room, in a drawer where she keeps papers and mementos—to take out the ones Chico gave her. It’s part of the last stretch of the day: the ones in which Carmen no longer looks like Carmen, or not the Carmen she thought she knew, but a woman who, before long, will fly from the nest. Carmen’s hair is still wet, because she went all the way under, and it’s up in an improvised bun: a ponytail she wraps around itself and secures with a hair tie. She has lowered her bikini straps to avoid tan lines, and although her body is turned toward the camera, she’s looking away from it, listening to someone. From the order of the images and the two that came before, she suspects that she’s talking to her cousin, who may be standing behind Chico. There are the eyes, tiny, so inexpressive; the father’s eyes, which María would recognize—whether or not she wanted to—in any face she came across. There are the thick brows, the very pale skin; you can’t see them in the photo, because of the quality of the print, but her memory calls up the blue lines on Carmen’s arms. Her nose begins just under her eyebrows, thin at the top and wide at the bottom; virtually funnel-shaped. Her lips are thick; her ears, flush to the sides of her head; her hair is light brown and very thin. María remembers how carefully she would brush it for her. Her face is square, her forehead wide, her features drawn with a firm hand. She’s a little over five three, neither fat nor thin, and her breasts have matured quite a bit in the last year. María repeats this description out loud every two or three days so she won’t forget it. As for what Carmen is like inside, she doesn’t really know: a scant five-minute catchup every Sunday night, and when María visits, she tries hard to plan some activity for the two of them, which Carmen always cancels, because her head hurts or she’d rather stay in. It pains her, she tells Chico, that the girl has no sense of humor, but on the other hand, she’s very mature for her age. That summer, she stopped going to school because she didn’t like studying, and in September she’s due to start at one of the department stores in the town. Now, on her way home, Carmen stops by the restaurant where Chico works, killing time over a glass of water, and they walk back together, he to his apartment, and she with him, some nights. María hopes she’ll keep her paycheck for herself, trusting that one day she’ll want to go back to school, start her own business, where no one can order her around.
It’s a Monday. She’s had a hard time closing her eyes tonight, let alone sleeping; Pedro went home to make sure everything was okay, not trusting his mother to tell him otherwise over the phone, and after dinner, he came back to María’s to be with her. He lasted until after midnight. He didn’t sleep there—he never has; María has never begun a day waking up beside a man—but he did stay quiet next to her, first on the couch, holding her hand, then lying down, trying to get her to rest. A whimper prefaced the weeping: María, who hadn’t cried when Irene died, who hadn’t cried when her father died, now couldn’t stop. Pedro called a few minutes ahead of the alarm clock. I haven’t slept, she said when she picked up. I haven’t either, he said. How are you doing, María? Not good, but it’ll pass; everything always does. I’m leaving for work soon. Me too. I’ll call you when I get home. I’ll be here. You don’t have to come over. I was going to go for coffee with Conchita’s daughter today, and give back some of her books. It might be good for me to be around someone who doesn’t know. Kisses. Kisses to you, too. Although the October sun is still kind, and María is ready—the same uniform Monday to Saturday, blue pants and baggy white shirt, sneakers so her feet won’t hurt later—so early that she could afford the red lights, even the one near the station that takes so long to change, in spite of all that, today, she needs an empty mind, routine, something to keep her occupied. She takes the metro, finds it impossible to read, overhears the conversations of the other early risers: they talk about their weekends, the family meal on Sunday, the problems their children are having at school. She gives up her seat to a pregnant woman and moves to the other side of the car: the dialogues repeat; coworkers, neighbors, people who see each other morning after morning after morning. That living landscape seems strange to her, so different from the one she would have traversed if she had taken the bus: from the functional buildings to the beautiful ones, a handful of monuments, and afterward, the shift to being surrounded by skyscrapers, like traveling back and forth in time. Some of the faces she recognizes, of course: a woman who lives a few doors down from her, whom she often sees at the butcher’s, and a man who looks a lot like one from her first years at the association: maybe it is him, or maybe it’s his brother; the features are the same, but he either doesn’t recognize her or pretends not to. She has learned to respect other people’s desire for silence. Maybe that’s what it is, with the man; whatever it is, it’s his business.
She arrives at the building ahead of Teresa: by fifteen or twenty minutes, she thinks when she gets off the metro; when she sees the clocks in the lobby, she discovers it’s more than that. She decides to go ahead on her own and, if she finishes early, get a start on some of Teresa’s work. She removes the thin layer of dust that has gathered on the filing cabinets in the last two days; she forces water and soap against a coffee ring on a table. She looks at the desks, some with framed family photos, otherwise mostly identical: papers and pens, files and ashtrays, typewriters—one of the companies in the building has electric ones, and she runs a duster over them, careful not to do any damage. She opens some windows, grateful for the cool wind; she breathes in the lemony scent of the floor cleaner, finishes what she didn’t have time for the previous Saturday. Her jobs complete, and Teresa still yet to arrive, María takes the cleaning cart and shuts herself up in the storeroom and cries. It isn’t very often that she cries, almost never. She didn’t cry leaving Carmen with her parents and moving to Madrid; she never cried when she got fired from a job. It embarrassed her, crying in front of Pedro the previous night; she regretted letting herself be vulnerable, and when he left she allowed herself to weep, hoping to tire herself out that way and maybe get a little sleep. But she hadn’t.
She’s pulled herself together by the time Teresa arrives. Her eyes are red, and she hasn’t been able to hide the dark circles underneath them with makeup. Teresa asks if everything’s okay, if something’s happened, María offers to go around the different offices with her, until the employees arrive and they have to move on to the common areas, so as not to disturb anyone. Teresa hums, to avoid silence; she improvises anecdotes, jumping from decade to decade to keep María’s mind off whatever it is. A few weeks ago she was walking in the city center and, stepping over a grate, her skirt flew up in the stream of air, and everyone saw her underwear; she had to go in for a cup of tea somewhere just to calm down. María appreciates Teresa’s efforts, forces a smile so she’ll relax. Cleaning hallways and reception areas, with the radios as background noise, both of them are now quiet; one occasionally comments on a headline, the other nods. When the shift ends, they say goodbye. María goes to return her cart to the storeroom and feels Teresa’s hand on her back.
“I won’t ask you to tell me what happened; I don’t need to know. But I’m here for you, whatever you need.”
The offer doesn’t seem genuine to María. She and Teresa hardly know each other. What sense would there be in telling her about the phone call, describing what she heard and what she felt? How could Teresa empathize, knowing nothing about the rest of the characters in her story? She doesn’t remember ever mentioning Carmen. María would have to go back to the beginning, when she had just turned sixteen, and she and Soledad were doing alterations for a seamstress: from morning to night, thread and needle and precision, no machines at all. One day, Chico woke up with a very high fever, and their mother was afraid it would get worse if he went out to do his delivery and pickups, so María had to walk to the avenue and catch the bus to the city center, to make sure his shift was done and the day’s money not lost. A single street was her entire world: an invisible border lay two or three blocks from her house, she’d barely gone beyond it to attend school—she had dropped out a few years before—and now, she crossed it only on her mother’s arm. But a man sat down next to her on the bus, and his eyes, dark and very small, roused her curiosity. She answered his questions: my name is María, I’m sixteen, yes, I live on this street, at number fifteen, with my parents and two younger siblings, the older ones are married and living on their own. In the days that followed, with Chico still recovering and María filling in for him, the man got into the habit of sitting down next to her, and going on with his questions: I don’t mind sewing, and it keeps me busy, but I don’t want to do it forever, maybe I’ll try something else later on; staying in school never occurred to me, it never seemed possible, we can always use a little extra money at home, and my younger brother, he’s the really smart one. Later, after Chico got better, María ran into the man from the bus one morning when she and her siblings went out to the square to sit in the sun. The man asked her to come over several times, and María didn’t say no. The last time she went, it was already cold out. Chico liked to put his hand on her belly, in the final months, and feel the baby kick; when Carmen was born, her father told María that his brother in Madrid had gotten her a job. María didn’t say no then either. The first few times she went home, she talked about wanting to save up a little money, rent a place on her own, take Carmen with her. Chico kept her from telling their parents at first; years later, she worked up the courage, but her mother wouldn’t allow it. What was she to Carmen? Someone who showed up two or three times a year, on hand in moments neither of sickness nor happiness; missing from all the memories she would return to as an adult. And what was Carmen to her? Her mother took care of her all day long. Who would look after Carmen in Madrid, when María was working? How would she fit a baby, soon enough a little girl, soon enough a teenager, into her routine? María pressed from time to time, at Christmas, when she visited during the summer; she asked how much money—how much more money—she needed for her daughter to come and live with her. She did the math, she saved and saved. The last time she asked—now with money enough that the two of them could make a start—her mother told her that Carmen would rather stay there, with them. Now, if she told Teresa all of that, would she understand why she was crying? She didn’t want to mention the phone call: the story Carmen told her, which she already knows; she’d lived it herself when she was a few years older than her daughter. But that’s not even what bothers her, because she knows her daughter will bear the consequences the same way she did, will wear a borrowed wedding dress, will keep the photos from that day in a box so no one sees her belly. What bothered her was the tone, the ending, the way she said goodbye. She could say, for example:
“She called me ‘María,’ Teresa. Not ‘Mother,’ not ‘Mom’: she used my name. She told me not to bother showing up, because it’s going to be a big day for her, and there’s no reason I should pretend to care now, if I never really have.”
But it would be hard for María to suddenly come out with all of that, since they’ve never gone beyond casual conversation, never opened any space for the sharing of secrets; to tell her would have meant forcing that connection, letting all her feelings come tumbling out about her relationship with Carmen, the wedding, the birth. Would she even hear about any of it? Would Carmen call to tell her? Would Chico? She desperately hopes that it’s a boy.
María smiles at Teresa, hugs her, and says thank you, thank you so much. She pushes her cleaning cart into the storeroom and hurries out so that she gets away a little ahead of her coworker, so that she can leave on her own. She’ll try not to think on the journey home, but she’ll be thinking the whole time: about the conversation with Carmen, about Chico begging her to forgive him for not having suspected, about Pedro’s clumsy attempts to console her. On the metro, a woman tells another that her daughter is pregnant, that in five months she’ll be a grandmother. Well, I won’t, María feels like saying, but she doesn’t, afraid they’ll think she’s crazy: you’ll never guess what happened on the metro this afternoon. Keep quiet and act like everything’s fine—that’s the best way to forget. At home, she eats lunch and waits for Laura to arrive, they chat about this and that. At one point, María asks:
“Can you recommend a novel for me? Or short stories? Something with the same themes we’ve been reading about.”
I want the comfort of reading stories worse than my own.
Money’s the thing: not having enough is the thing. Every one of the situations that brought María here—“here” being the one-bedroom apartment in Carabanchel, the metro ride to Nuevos Ministerios—would have unfolded differently if there’d been money. She and Soledad and Chico left school because the family needed money; for money, she filled in for her brother one morning when he was sick, so they wouldn’t lose that day’s earnings. If her parents had had money back then—if they were well enough to earn it, had enough of it to stay well—would she have met that man, on that bus? They walked the same streets: they would have crossed paths at the corner store, maybe, or one Sunday, at her brother’s bar. But with money, without a lack of money, María would have been walking to school then, setting off from a big house with a bedroom of her own. For money, she had to leave home before she was ready, replace her daughter’s scent with that of someone else’s son. The apartment she lives in is the apartment she can afford, not the apartment she’d like to have, and her job is the one, being who she is, having the money she’s had, to which she could aspire. Everything she hasn’t experienced has been because of a lack of money. The vacations she hasn’t taken, the dresses she’s decided not to buy, eating at home with Pedro, to save a little. The money she sent to her mother wasn’t enough to make Carmen happy; maybe it seemed like too little, maybe she couldn’t appreciate—someday—that she was absent because of just that: money. But because of something else, too: because she’s a woman. When the man on the bus asked her a question, she chose to answer, because saying nothing seemed rude. She endured the pregnancy at home, hidden away, sewing in the backyard so she could at least see the sky. What was he doing then? He took his life elsewhere: his job, his family, starting over in another neighborhood. Some nights, she’s run all the way to the door of her building, when it got dark before it was even late; she has kept quiet in meetings for years, listening to her arguments, her ideas, in Pedro’s mouth.
María thinks about things you can buy, things you can buy without anyone raising an eyebrow when a woman pays for them. The metro card she uses to go from home to work, from work to home. A comfortable sofa. The washing machine. The fridge. The food: what she buys, and also, in a way, what she rules out because of the price. The beers she has after meetings, when Pedro or some other friend isn’t paying. The discomfort when someone announces that the next round is on him, since that means it’ll eventually be her turn. A bouquet of flowers she got herself a few days ago. The plants, too: the water and sun make them grow, but she bought them, the seeds, the little clay pots that she’d like to paint someday, when she has the time and the money. Money can buy all that: money can get you anything. With money, she pays the rent on the apartment she lives in alone, where Pedro sometimes comes to see her; without money, she’d have to live with him, at his parents’ place, taking care of his mother and his brother, tied to whatever wages they thought she was worth, tied to the affection she would have to pretend to feel for them. María has been sharing out money since the day she started earning it. She gave her mother every céntimo she made at the sewing shop. Her salary from the first house, too: something for her aunt and uncle, for her cousin’s room, and the rest back to her mother, for Carmen, with the same dark eyes as the man on the bus; María kept a little for herself, to get around, so she could buy herself something someday. It didn’t matter what; anything just to make the possessive hers again: my skirt, my earrings. When she was earning a bit more, she found herself an apartment, a small one, little more than a single bedroom on the same street where she lives now, taking advantage when the people who’d lived there before went back to their villages in Extremadura, in Andalucía: it didn’t hurt that her boss said she was reliable and decent, but she’d rented it with money; money also bespeaks reliability, decency. María kept sending money home; she got a job that wasn’t any better but that paid a little more, rented a bigger apartment: a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom. She wanted to buy, little by little, the roof over her head—the roof under which she would die—but she had to save up for a down payment; if she managed, it would take twice as long as it did for everyone else, because she was doing it alone. She thinks that has to do with money, too. Is there anything money can’t buy? Maybe she should have saved more money for Carmen. Maybe she should have given her more extravagant gifts: not the doll she could afford, but the one all her classmates were playing with. Maybe when María learned that Carmen had dropped out, she should have offered her something else: college, the two of them living together. Surely, Conchita’s daughter would have helped them. What would Carmen have wanted to be? What was she good at? María had no idea. How must her daughter feel about money?