Read the first chapter of 'El Jilguero' by Donna Tartt

Child with skull

Yo

I was still in Amsterdam when I dreamed of my mother for a long time.I had been locked in Elhotel for more than a week, fearful to telephone someone or get out of the room, and the heart was unbridled when he heard to the most innocent noise: the timbre of the censor, the trachetening of the minibar cart, even the bells of the churchesGiving the hours, from WesterToren, Krijtberg, a notesbrie.During the day, sitting at the foot of the bed, I struggled to decipher them news from Dutch television (something useless, since I did not know a word of Dutch), and when I gave up, I stayed next to Laventana watching the channel wrapped in my coat ofCamel hair, then I had left New York in a precipitous way and the clothes that Mehabia brought did not warm enough, not even inside the habitation.

Out everything was bustling and joy.We were at Christmas and on the bridges of the channel the lights binded at night;Damen in Heren of red cheeks, with scarves that waved to the cold wind, they passed the cobblestones with cobblestones tied by the rear of their bicycles.In the afternoon a band of fond musicians played carols that floated, stridents andfragiles, in the winter air.

A chaos of room service trays;Too many cigarettes;Tibio vodka Duty-Free.During those agitated days of confinement I got to know until the last of the room as a prisoner knows his cell.It was the first time that was in Amsterdam;He had barely visited the city, and, SinEmbargo, the room itself, with its sober beauty, full of currents and bleached by the sun, it was like a vivid recreation of the northern deeuropEncalado combined with an extreme luxury brought on East shipsmercantes.I spent an unreasonable amount of time by examining a pair of tiny oils with a golden frame that hung on the writing, one of several peasants skating on an icy pond to a church, and the other, a sailboat shaken in a marinvernal chopped;They were decorative copies that had nothing particular, although I inspected them as if they saved an encrypted key that Meperít.It was the Aguanieve, he replaced against the venues of the venues and drizzled on the channel;And despite the fact that the brocades werexquisitos and the fluffy carpet, the winter light evoked the adverse 1943: austerity and deprivations, a sugar -free tea and a lacama hunger.

Every morning very early, when it was still dark, before the diurnal personnel and the vestibulus began to fill, I went down to look for the newspapers.The hotel employees swarmed with voices off and stealthy steps, looking me fleetingly with coldness, as if they did not see me at all, the American state of the 27 that never appeared during the day;I tried to be able to tell me that the manager at night (dark suit, rapped rap.

The Herald Tribune did not report my tighten, but all Dutch newspapers published the news in dense foreign deleter block.Onopgeloste Mord.Onbekende.I went up and lay down (dress, because it was very cold in the room), and opened the potatoes on the quota: photographs of patrol cars, tapesacordonando the place of the crime, even the headlines were stated, and although they did not seem to mention my name, there were noTo know if they offered a description of me or hid the information to the readers.

The room.The radiator.Een Amerikaan Met Een Strafblad.The Olive Green Water of the Channel.

As I was terrified of cold and sick, and most of the time I knew what to do (in addition to the coat clothes, I had forgotten to bring a book), I spent almost all day in bed.It gave the impression that dusk in mid -afternoon.Often, with the creak of the newspapers died, I plunged me into a sleep;The majority of my stabs of the same indefinite anxiety that permeated the hours I was awake: judgments, bursted suitcases on the asphalt with Mirop.

Because of the fever I had many strange and extremely vivid dreams, as well as sweat waves in which I stirred restlessly in the Camasin barely distinguish the day of the night;But in the last and worst night I dreamed with my mother: a brief and mysterious dream that I lived as an appearance.I was in the hobie store - I better, in some happy space of the dream that was like a sketch version of the store - when she suddenly arose behind my back and saw her behind me in a mirror in a mirror.Seeing her, I was paralyzed defelicity;It was even in the slightest detail, even the drawing that formed her freckles, and she smiled at me, more beautiful and yet not more now, with black hair and the funny ascending curve of her mouth; it was not so much a dream as a presence thatIt filled all habiting, a completely own force, a living otherness.Although that was my first impulse, I knew I couldn't come back, burning it meant violating the laws of his world and mine;She had accused me in the only way to her reach, and our eyes were found in the mirror for a silent long minute;But justifying it gave the impression of being about to speak - with what seemed like a mixture of joy, affection and exasperation - among us, fog and woke up.

YoYo

I would have better things if she had lived.But he died when I was still a child;And although everything that has happened to me is my fault, by losing my mother, I lost sight.

His death marked the dividing line: the before and after.And Sibien is sad to admit it after so many years, I have not yet known Anadie that makes me feel as dear as she did.In Sukomy everything came to life;irradia a light so magical that it was more life and color to see it through his gaze;I remember that a few weeks before her death, while she had dinner with her in an Italian restaurant of the Village and in the night, I borne my Lamanga before the unexpected and almost painful beauty of what I saw: Lacocin brought in procession a birthday cake;The light of the velas was a weak trembling circle on the dark roof, and they left it in table to shine in the middle of the family, embellishing theostro of an old woman;Everything were smiles around, while the cumage made aside with their hands on their backs;Solose was one of those birthday celebrations that could see any modest restaurant in the center, and I am sure that I would nore that episode if my mother had not died soon, but I thought about that again and again after her death,And I will probably remember my whole life: the circle illuminated with candles, an altarpiece of shared happiness that vanished when I lost it.

My mother was pretty, besides.That is almost secondary, but it was.When he arrived in New York from Kansas, he worked sporadically comomodelo, although he never felt comfortable in the face of the goal to be very good;In fact, that distinctive touch was not reflected in negative.

And yet, it was fully herself, a rarity.I do not remember ever seeing another person who looks like.He had the ball, pale and freckled complexion in summer, and some bright blue eyes;In her cheekbone curve there was such an unusual mixture of the tribal and the Celtic twilight that sometimes people took her porislandondas.It was actually half Irish and half Cherokee, from a Kansas city close to the Oklahoma border;She liked making me calling herself Okie, as the impoverished inhabitants of that state who had emigrated during depression were known, although she was as elegant, bright and bright as a racing horse.Unfortunately, that exotic character appears too raw and implacable the photographs - the fish hides with makeup, the threaded in a ponytail at the nape height as some noble in the history of Genji - and there is no trace of its warmth,of his e -hearted cheerful nature, which was what I liked most about her.Due to the immobility that emanates in the photos, it is evident that the camera inspires with the confidence: it has a watchman and fierce air, as if an attack is prepared.But in life it was not like that.He moved thickening, with sudden and light gestures, and he always sat in the chair soberry like an elegant swamp bird about to raise the frightened stream.I loved its perfume of sandalwood, rough and unexpected, and the frufrú that made its starchy shirt when I was leaning for my forehead.His laugh was enough to take away from a kick loque you were doing and follow her.Wherever I was going, the men observed with the corner of the eye, and sometimes they looked at her in a way burned a little.

I was to blame for me to die.The others are always pressed to deny it: "You were a kid", "who could imagine it", "a frightful unaccident", "bad luck", "it could have gone right" ... right, but I don't believe a word.

It happened in New York, on April 10, fourteen years ago.(Aúnahora my hand is reluctant to write the date; I have had to employ it, so that the pen continues to move on the paper.Before it was a normal day, but now a rusty nail stands out from calendar.)

If that day everything would have gone as planned, the sky would have melted, faded without a trace along with the rest of my eighth course.What would you remember now?Little or nothing.SinEmbargo, the texture of that morning, the wet sensation and saturadadel air, is more clear than the present.After raining all night in a terrible storm, there were flooded stores and a couple of closed subwaystations;We were both standing at the mockery -on that extended outside the lobby of the floors building where we lived while my mother's favorite janitor, Goldie, who ladoraba, walked backwards on the street fifty -seven with the raised and whistling to stop a taxi.Cars passed under dirty water curtains;On the skyscrapers rollednubes loaded with rain that from time to time they opened leaving clear blue sky, and on the street, under the smoke of the tubes ofescape, blew a soft and humid wind like spring.

"Oh, she is busy, ma'am," Goldie shouted above the rumble of the street, dodging a taxi that folded the corner splashing him yapagged the green light.

It was the most often of the janitors: a Puerto Rican from Tezclara, skinny, pale and energetic that had been a pen boxer.Aunque tenía las mejillas flácidas de tanto darle a la botella (a vecesse presentaba en el turno de noche oliendo a J&B), era enjuto,musculoso y rápido; siempre estaba bromeando y continuamente se tomabaun descanso para fumarse un cigarrillo en la esquina, desplazando elpeso de un pie al otro mientras se echaba vaho en las blancas manosenguantadas cuando hacía frío, contando chistes en español y haciendodesternillarse de la risa a los demás conserjes.

"Do they have a lot of hurry this morning?"She asked my mother.

In his sheet he read «Burt D.", But everyone called him Goldie, derived from Gold, for his golden tooth and because he was named gold.

"No, go with plenty of time.Don't worry.

But he seemed exhausted and his hands trembled as he knotted the handkerchief again, who got up and stirred with the wind.

Goldie must not realize, because he turned to me (who was supposed with an evasive attitude against the concrete pot that had affront the building, looking everywhere except her) with certain approach.

"Are you not going to take the train?"-I wonder.

"No, we have some errands to do," my mother replied without much conviction, realizing that I didn't know what to say.

I did not usually look at how I was dressed, but the outfit that was that morning (White Gabardina, a diaphanous pink handkerch.

I was thirteen years old.I can't like to remember how uncomfortable we were both that last morning, enough to be noticed;At any other time we would have been speaking in a friendly way, but that morning we had nothing to tell us because they had expelled me from school.They had called Mimadre to his office the day before, and she had returned home and furious;The terrible thing was that I did not even know why I had been released, although I was almost certain that Mr. Beeman (in the abject of his office to the teacher's room) had looked for the second floor of the second floor at the least timely time and had seen me fumarIn the school.(Rather, I had seen Tom Cable's commendation while he smoked, which came in my school..) My mother hated tobacco.His parents - especially those who loved hearing, and who had died unfairly before I had the opportunity to meet them - had been horsepower who were traveling around the west and raised horses to make a living;They were a cheerful decassary players and cocktail drinkers, they went to Kentucky derby every year and cigarettes throughout the house in silver boxes.One day, when I returned from the stables, my grandmother folded in two and began atoser blood;From then on, during the rest of the adolescence my mother there were always oxygen bottle on the front porch and the bedroom blinds remained.

But, as I feared, and not without reason, the cigarette of Tom Solo had the tip of the iceberg.I had been problems at school for a long time.Everything had begun, or, rather, he had aggravated, some months behind, when my father had left, leaving my mother and love;We had never got along very well and, in general, my mother and yo were better without him, but other people seemed to be scandalized and scorched before the abrupt way in which he had left us (without money nicing, nor a contact direction);The professors of the Upper West Side Micolegio bought me so much, and they were tan impact to demonstrate their understanding and support, that forcefully indulgent me with me - despite being a scholarship student -, postponing dates of delivery of exercises and giving me second and utter opportunities;In other words, loosening the rope, until, in a matter of a few months, I managed to fall into a very profundo hole.

So they had summoned us both - my mother and me - in Elcolegio.The meeting was not until half past eleven, but my mother was forced to take the day off, and we went to the Westside early for breakfast (and have a serious talk, I imagined);Once there, she would take the opportunity to buy a birthday gift for your office colleague.The previous night he had stayed up there.

"I don't know what you will think," Goldie said irritated to my mother, "but I'm already fed up with spring and humidity.I see nothing but rain ... ”he scored and, climbing the neck of the formatral coat, he looked at the sky.

—I think they said that this afternoon will escape.

"Yes, I know, but I'm ready for summer.—You rub his hands—.Everyone leaves the city, they hate it, complain about heat, peroyo ..., I am a tropical bird.The more heat it does better.Not Letemo!"Batting Palmas, she turned around and moved away from Lacalle—.What do I want to say, what I like most is the peace that Haquí.When Julio arrives, the building stays deserted and calm, everyone leaves, do you know?"He broke your fingers to a taxi that went to all valocity.".They are my vacation.

"But don't you shrink here?"—My FatherNotsoported that tendency of her to establish conversation with lascamarras, the janitors and the elderly sibilants of the dry cleaners—.I want to say that in winter at least one can be warm ...

"You don't know what this work is in winter.I assure you that, for many coats and hats that you wear, it is cold.Can you imagine here, in January or February, with the wind that blows delrío?Brrrr.

Agitated and biting my thumb, I stood looked at lostaxis that passed at full speed in front of the arm up raised Degoldie.I knew it would be an exhausting wait until the appointment of the eleven and media;All I could do was be still and not babbling a question that could incriminate me.I had no idea what we would see my mother and me once we were in the office;LAMISMA word "quote" made a meeting of authorities, accusations and intimidations, a possible expulsion.It would be a disaster I lost my scholarship;Since my father was gone.First of all, I was dead concern if Mr. Beeman had seen in some way that Tom Cable and I had paved empty unverainous houses when I stayed at his home in the Hamptons.I say "to pave" but we had not forced any lock or cause for any way (Tom's mother was a real estate agent, and we opened the door with the game of keys she kept in her office).We fell nothing in the cabinets and snorted in the drawers of the comfortable, but we had also taken some things: beers of the fridge, an Xbox game, a DVD (Danny the dog, left after) and money, about ninety -two dollars inTotal, in Decinco bills and ten wrinkled with a kitchen jar, and many laundry coins.

When I remembered it I had nausea.It had not been going for Casade Tom for months and although I tried to convince myself that Mr. Beeman could not hear about our adventures - how was he going to find out? -, miimagination galloped from here to there in terrified Zigzags.I am not to betray Tom (although he did not have the assurance that he did not do), but that left me in a very vulnerable situation.How could I have been so stupid?Rauting a house was a crime;Lagente went to jail for that.The previous night I had spinned in the bed for hours torturing me while contemplating how the rain gap in irregular bursts the window crystal, wondering I could tell them if they interrogated me.However, how was I admitted when I was not sure that they knew it?

Goldie released a great sigh, lowered her arm and walked back on her heels to where my mother was.

—Yoncreíble —le dijo, sin apartar los ojos hastiados de la calle—.The floods have reached the Soho, as you should know, and Carlosos was saying that they have closed some streets next to the UN building.

Uncle.Perhaps we had more luck if we had walked a couple of apple.And just at that time - suddenly that we all gave a jerky - untaxi with the green light shown to us, raising unanic of water with a sewer smell.

-Care!Said Goldie, jumping sideways while Taxiavanzaba with difficulty until he stops.Then, warning that my mother had umbrella, he added. "Wait.He entered the lobby and became the collection of lost and forgotten umbrella Queguarded in a brass umbrelro next to the chimney and that redistribute them rainy days.

"Don't worry, Goldie," said my mother, taking out her little folding stripe model, "I'm prepared ..."

Goldie returned from a stride to the gutter and closed the deltaxi door behind her.Then he crouched down and tapped in Laventanilla.

"You go with God.

YoYoYo

I like to believe that I am an intuitive person (as we all do, I suppose) and when writing about that day it is tempting to say that some ove.But I was deaf and blind to the future;Myúnica and overwhelming concern was the school meeting.When I called atom to tell him that they had expelled me (whispering on the phone, because my mother had confiscated my mobile), he did not seem much to pretend much."Look," he said, interrupting me, "don't be stupid, Theo.No one knows anything.Don't even think about the fucking mouth."And before I could say something else, he added," I'm sorry, I have to go, "he said.

In the taxi, I tried to open some fingers the window to enter a little air;I was not lucky.He stinched as if someone had changed dirty diapers in the back seat, or even had been in it and then had tried to cover the stench throwing a coconut setter with a smell of sunscreen.The seats, prapported with adhesive tape, were greasy, and the buffers were almost non -existent.When we went through a pothole, the ediers vibrated at the same time as the religious baratijas that hung delighting: medallions, a tiny curved sword that danzabasused of a plastic chain and a bearded guru with turban burned towards the rear seat with penetrating eyes, with the palmof Lamano raised in the act of blessing.

Throughout Park Avenue, the rows of red tulips were in position of firm as we went at full speed.Bollywood Pop, reduced to a weak and almost subliminal groan, was hypnotically in spiral flashes right on the Demi -heard threshold.The leaves of the trees began to fall.Distributors Ded’agostino and Gristede pushed cars -made cars; overwhelmed executives passed with great heelspor the sidewalk dragging renewal toddlers;a uniform employee with the gutter with a broom and a long stick pickup;Bolsa lawyers and chords wrinkled their eyes when looked up at the sting, with one hand lifted with the palm up.While Eltaxi tumbos on the avenue (my mother, with a miserable air, wasferred to the support to arm themselves), I observed through laventilla the dispute faces of every day (people congabardine and worried expression crowded in gloomy crowds in the crossings, drinkingDisposable cup coffee, speaking by mobile phones and furtively moving from one place to another) and tried not to think about the degradable destinations that could wait for me, some of them related to the Juvenile Court or the prison.

The taxi swingon when taking a closed curve on eighty -six street.My mother fell on me and grabbed my arm;I saw that she was cold and pale.

"Are you dizzy?"I asked, forgetting my problems for a moment.

I had a fixed and afflicted expression that I immediately recognized: the tights, the wet forehead and the glassy and very open eyes.

He started saying something, but he took a hand to his mouth when Eltaxi stopped with a shock in a traffic light, throwing us and then back against the seat.

"Wait," I said, and I leaned to hit the plexiglass greasy.

The driver (a Sij with a turban) gave a jack.

"Hey," I said through the grid, "we get off here.

The SIJ, reflected in the mirror of the rearview mirror adorned with garlands, looked at me carefully.

"They want to stop here.".

-Yes please.

"But this is not the address you have given me.

-I know.But we are doing well, ”I replied, looking again at Mimadre, who stirred in his bag, with the rímel run and an expression formed, looking for the wallet.

-He is okay?Asked the taxi driver, little convinced.

-Yes Yes.We just need to go down, thanks.

With trembling hands, my mother took a handful of dollars of wet -up that slid below the rack.While the Sijcogy (with resignation, diverting my eyes), I got off and sustained open lamp.

My mother gave a stumbling block at the gutter and grabbed my arm.

-You are well?I asked shyly while the taxi moved away at high speed.

We were in the north of Fifth Avenue, next to the mansions they gave to the park.

She took a deep breath, then wiped her forehead and gave me a squeeze in her arm.

"U, "he said, fanning one hand.

He shone his forehead and still looked a little lost; his slightly disheveled appearance made a marine bird to the wind has diverted from course.

"I'm sorry, but I still notice my legs a little loose.Less we have gotten out of that taxi.I will be fine.I just needed to drink some air.

People spent around us in the corner fills decorientes: schoolgirls with uniform running and laughing while we were;children pushing sophisticated strollers with two or threebebés.An overwhelmed lawyer look up touched by passing off the side grabbing his son by the wrist.

"No, Braden." He said the child, who trot to put on height, "you shouldn't think that way.It is important to work in Algo that you like ...

We separate ourselves to dodge the cube full of soapy water that an emptied concierge on the sidewalk in front of its building.

"Tell me," said my mother, rubbing her temples with the fingertips, "was me or that taxi smelled incredibly ...?"

-Disgusting?A mixture of Hawaiian tropics and shitty diapers?

She fastened her face with one hand.

"The truth ..., I wouldn't have imported so much if you hadn't been bugs and sudden branches.I was perfectly and I have soon became fatal.

"Why don't you ask if you can sit in the front seat?"

"You speak like your father.

I looked ashamed, because I had also perceived a left your irritating pedantic tone.

—Yoremos andando hasta Madison y buscaremos un lugar para sentarnos—dije, pues estaba muerto de hambre y allí había un local que megustaba.

But - almost with a chill, followed by a visible wave of nausea - she made a gesture of denial.

-Air."I had rímel fences under the eyes.".The air will sit well.

"What you say," I replied, maybe too quickly, impatient for please.

I struggled to be pleasant, but my mother, still dizzy and as she felt, had not overlooked the tone of my voice;She met carefully, trying to find out what she was thinking.(That one another bad habit that we had acquired after living during my father: try to read the thought of the other.)

"Are there anywhere you want to go?"

"Hum, not really," I replied, going back a step and looking at the dismayed;Although he was hungry, he was not in a position to insist.

"I will be fine.".give me a minute.

"Queh ..." I suggested flashing, what did she want? What would she like? "We could sit in the park.

Relieved, I saw that she nodded.

"Very well," he said with what I called his voice from Mary Poppins, "but only until he recovers his breath.

And we head towards the pedestrian crossing of Seventy and New street, passing ahead of bushes cut with baroque enmaceteros animal shapes and heavy wrought iron doors.The light had turned off until it was in an industrial gray tone, and the breeze Eratan dense as the steam that rises from a water boil.At the other way for the street, next to the park, some artists set up support, unwindering canvases and hanging their watercolors from Lacatedral Saint Patrick and the Brooklyn bridge.

We walk in silence.I thought about my situation (had any calls the parents of Tom? Why didn't it have been asking him?), As well as what I would ask for breakfast how much I managed to take my mother to the cafeteria (tortilla depatatas withBeicon in the western style; she would take the usual, unattock of rye with climbing eggs and a coffee alone), and barely gave attention to where we headed when I realized that she acquired something to say something.I didn't look at me but to the park;His expression me thought about a famous French film whose title did not remember, in which distracted individuals walked through the streets whipped by the wind and spoke a lot but in reality they did not seem to speak some melts.

-What have you said?I asked after a few minutes of confusion, pressing the step to reach it—.The return of what ...?

She seemed to be surprised, as if she had forgotten that I was there.The White Gabardina, who waved to the wind, increased Ibis tap with long legs, as if they were about to display them wings and raise the flight above the park.

"What do you go around?"

My mother looked at me without understanding, then shook her head and laughed in that abrupt and childish way she had.

-Nothing.I said "turns of time".

Although it was strange to say it, I knew what he meant, or at least I know: that shudder when feeling suddenly disconnected, the seconds of absence on the sidewalk, like a parenthesis of perpetrated time or some photograms cut from a movie.

"No, no, puppy, I just referred to the neighborhood," he added by the hair and making me smile almost ashamed;Thus Ecomo called me as a child, "puppy", and I liked it so little that my hair would rush my hair, but still self -conscious as I felt Mealegre to see that she was in a better humor—.The same thing always happens to me.When I am here it is as if I was eighteen years old and ended up getting out of the bus.

-Here?I asked without conviction, allowing me to take my hand, something I would not have done -.It's strange.

I knew everything about the first days that my mother had spent Manhattan, far from the fifth avenue, on Avenida B, in Unesudio located on top of a bar where the vagrants slept in Elportal, the bar fights extended to the streetAnd an old woman named Mo had ten or twelve cats she had collected from Lacalle under the staircase on the upper floor.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Yes, but this street is still exactly the same as the first day I saw her.It's like entering a time tunnel.In the Lower East Side ... well, you know what things are there, there is always something new, although I felt like rip van winkle, increasingly far from everything.Some children woke me up and it was as if they had come and changed the signs during the night.The old restaurants closed, and where a modern bar appeared ...

I kept a respectful silence.Lately my mother had the passage of time, maybe because her birthday approached."I am too old for this," he had said days ago as he knew on the floor rummaging under the sofa cushions, in the coats of the coats and the jackets in search of loose coins to pay the boy of the distributs of the charcutía.

He put his hands in his coat pockets.

"There are not so many changes here," he said.Although he spoke with Tonodesenfadado, I saw that there was confusion in his eyes;It was evident that he was not asleep well because of me—.Upper Park is one of the few places where you can still see what the city was like in the decade of Milochoco Ninety.Also in Gramorcy Park and in a part of the Village.Even so, when I first arrived in New York, I thought this was the Edith Wharton, Franny and Zooey neighborhood and breakfast at Tiffany’s, all in one.

—Franny and Zooey takes place in the West Side.

"Yes, but then I was too palurda to know.I can just say that it was quite different from the Lower East, where the wagons set fire to the garbage cubes.Here on weekends they were magical, spinning through the museum ..., wandering me alone by Central Park ...

"Deamulating?"—They are part of my mother's vocabulary sounded to my ears, and "wandering" it seemed to me some term of the childhood of her, a slow ride perhaps, an equine step delivered it and trot.

"Well, you know, going from here to there.No Blanca, with holes in the socks and feeding myself based on oatmeal.Or not, I came here some weekends.Saved for the return train.That was when there were still tickets instead.Even so, you were supposed to pay to enter the Museum.The "suggested donation".Well, I imagine that I was a lot.

-What happens?I asked turning.

"I have noticed something.".He scored a hand and looked to heaven—.You do not?

And while he said it seemed that the light was leaving.Heaven darkens quickly, became blacker in seconds;The wind waved the park trees and the new leaves of the branches highlighted yellow and two against the clouds.

"Wow, how lucky," my mother exclaimed, ".A good will fall."He leaned towards the street, looking north: there was no taxis.

I took his hand again.

"Come on, we will have more luck on the other side.

We hope to change the traffic light.They flew and swirled papers down the street.

"Look, there is a taxi," I said looking at Fifth Avenue, but the phrase was not over yet when a businessman down the sidewalk with his arm raised and the green light went out.

On the opposite sidewalk the artists rushed to cover susquisters with plastics.Coffee street vendor lowered the blinds of his cart.We crossed the street in a hurry and before we arrived at the other side, a thick rain drop fell to my cheek.Brown circles began to appear on Lacera, very spaced and deltamaño of a twenty -five cents coin.

-Dammit!Shouted my mother.

Stir in his bag looking for the umbrella, which was barely large enough for a person.

And finally, he discharged, in biased cold rainy curtains of wide wind bursts that folded the cups of the trees and stirred the sidewalk's awnings.My mother struggled to hold the small umbrella without great success.Losstrasecators who passed through the street and the park with briefcases and posiódicos on the head.There was something festive and cheerful in both of them, raising the steps, fast, fast, under the weak striped umbrella, neither more nor less as we are chair of some misfortune instead of going rights to meet him.

YoV

My mother was three important things after her arrival Anueva York by bus from Kansas, without friends and practically Sinblanca.The first was that a cazatalentos named Davy Jo Pickering Lavio serving tables in a cafeteria in the Village;He was a teenager with some Doc Martens, second -hand clothes from some tendabenphic and such a long braid hanging on his back that he could be on her.When he took a coffee, he offered him seven hundred and that that immediately went up to a thousand for replacing a young woman who did not show up on the other side of the street for a decatalogy photo shoot.He then pointed out the caravan and the team, installed in the Sheridan Square park;He counted the tickets and left them on the top.

"Once ten minutes," she replied;She served the rest of the breakfasts they had asked, then hung the apron and came out.

"It was only a model of mail -for -sales catalogs," lamestia was taken to tell people, to clarify that they had never worked fashion magazines or haute couture firms, but only for some chain circulars, with cheap sport clothes aimed atMEVOSSOURI AND MONTANA.Sometimes it was fun, but most of the collapses was not: swimsuType of the makeup department ran between Tomas to dry the sweat of the face with powders.

However, during those years in which he had pretended to be a university - posing in fictitious campuses in rigid couples or trios, with the books against the chest -, he had managed to save enough money to go to the university of truth and study art history in the university from New York.He had never seen a great picture in person who turned eighteen and went to live in New York;He desired to hurate the lost time;"Authentic happiness, earthly paradise," he had exclaimed, surrounded by art books and examining the same old slides (Manet, Vuillard) for hours and until he looks.("It's crazy," he had said, "but I would be happy looking at the same six paintings for the rest of my life.I can't think of a better way to go crazy.")

The university was the second thing that happened to her in New York; perhaps for her the most important.If it had not been for the third (knowing and marrying my father, which was not so lucky comolas two first), surely the degree and obtained the doctorate would have finished.Whenever I had a few hours off was runningal Frick, MoMA or MET;Hence, while we were under the porch of the museum, looking towards the fifth avenue wrapped in Bruma and observing how the rain bounced from the road, it did not get mesorted when she shook the umbrella and said:

"We could get in to take a look until I stopped.

"Hummm ..." What I wanted was breakfast..Yes of course.

He looked at his watch.

-We have time.It will be impossible to take a taxi with this downpour.

She was right.Even so, I was starving.What would we like something? I wondered bad.From what I knew, after the meeting she was furious who would not take me to any cafeteria, and I would have to go and settle for a cereal bar.

However, the museum was always a holiday;And once we entered and were wrapped in the cheerful clamor of the tourists who surrounded us, I felt strangely distanced from what I could see the day.In the main lobby the noise was deafenor and heeled to wet shelter.A multitude of Asian retirees soaked for our side behind a neat guide with hostess air;Ungroup of Girl Scouts Desaliñada whispered near the wardrobe, and along with the information counter was a row of military school cadet.

For me - a city boy, always confined among the four players of our floor -, the museums were interesting especially due to suampitude, a palace where the rooms never ended and as you got into it they were increasingly deserted.Some of the abandoned and the halls without cordoning off the depths of the European decoration section seemed mired in a spell, as no one would have stepped on for hundreds of years.Since I had started to move only by train, I loved going there and wandering that I lost me, entering more and more in the labyrinth of giggles;Sometimes I discovered forgotten armor and porcelain halls that I had never seen (and that, often, was not able to find a denuevo).

While queued behind my mother to enter, I leaned back back and looked at the deep and dark vaulted roof of dosplants high;If I looked at him with enough attention, I had the knowledge that I raised floating like a pen, a miniñez trick that lost intensity as it made me greater.

Meanwhile my mother, with a red and breath nose after the race in the rain, groped the wallet.

"When let's end up, I may pass me through the gift shop,".I am sure that the last thing Mathilde wants is a book Dearte, but he will not be able to grumble without looking like a palurda.

"Ostras," I said, ".Is the gift for Mathilde?

Mathilde was the art director of the advertising agency where my mother worked;daughter of a tycoon that imported fabrics, she was younger than my mother and had a reputation of groad and proceeds to the tantrums if the rental or elcater car service were not up to her.

-Yes."Without saying a word, she offered me a gum, which I accepted, yarroja the package back to the bag..I mean that this is the problem with Mathilde.For her a well -chosen gift should not be expensive;It could be a cheap pisapapeles from the market.What I suppose would be fantastic if any of us had time to live and kick the market.Last year he touched Peru.He panicked and at eating he ran to Saks, where fifty dollars from his pocket, plus what we had joined all, for some sunglasses, I think I think that Tom Ford.Even like like that had to release his pun on Americans and Consumerist Suculture.PRU is not even American but Australian.

"Have you talked to Sergio?"-asked.

Sergio, who was almost never in the office, although the chronicles of society often came out with people like Donatella Versace, was the minor owner of the agency;"Talking with Sergio de Something" was the same as saying: What would Jesus Christ do?

—What Sergio understands an art book is a compilationiode Helmut Newton or perhaps that great format enlightened volume that Hizomadonna a long ago.

I was about to ask who Helmut Newton was how much I had a better occurrence.

"Why don't you buy a subway card?"

My mother put her eyes blank.

"Cry me, I'm not missing.—It was shortly unleashed in the office when Mathilde's car was caught in a unempotellation, leaving it stranded in Williamsburg in the study of Unjoyero.

—Algo as well as anonymously.Leave an old card on your table, just to see your reaction.

"I'll tell you how my mother said, sliding her misocio card through the ticket sales window,".He would fire his secretary and perhaps half of the production.

The advertising agency where my mother worked was specialized in women's accessories.Throughout the day, under the agitated and slightly malicious rolle.It was good;I preferred that job to be behind Lacamara, and I knew I enjoyed seeing his work in the ads of themeter or in the advertising fences of Times Square.But despite the brightness the glamor of his employment (breakfast with champagne, Bergdorf deregalo bags), the days were very long and in the depths of everyone there was an emptiness - I knew it - that saddened her.What wanted was to return to university, although, of course, we both knew that I had little chances of getting it now that my father was gone.

—Bien —dijo, volviendo la espalda a la ventanilla y entregándomeun pase—, ayúdame a controlar el tiempo, ¿vale? Es una exposiciónenorme… —Señaló el póster: RETRATOS Y NATURALEZAS MUERTAS: OBRASMAESTRAS DEL SYoGLO DE ORO—.We can't see it all at once, but there are several pictures that ...

His voice was lost while I went behind her on the main stairs, debating me among the prudent need to follow her closely and the desire to stay back and pretend that she did not go with her.

"I can't go with so many hurries," she said when I said at the top of the stairs, "but this is the exhibition class that you have to visit two or three times.There is the anatomy lesson, which we cannot stop seeing, but what interests me is a small and uncommon work of a painter who was a master of Vermeer.The big masters of the painting you have news.Franshals paintings are also of great interest.You know Hals, right?The cheerful drinker?And the regents of the nursing home?

-Yes —respondí con vacilación.

Of the paintings she had mentioned, the only one she knew was the anatomy lesson.In the exhibition poster a detail appeared: lvid meat, multiple tones of black and drunk -appearance with the eyes in blood and the colored nose.

"Materia Art 101," said my mother, ".Here, to the left.

On the upper floor, with the hair still wet by the rain, it was cold cold.

"No, no, here," my mother told me, growning me with the sleeve.

It was not easy to find the exhibition, and while we roamed by the consistent galleries (zigzagening between the crowd, turning to the left right, and returning on our steps through spells and confused planes), they appeared in the most unexpected places and imprecestible some huge and drearyReproductions of the anatomy lesson, sinister posters with the same old corpse with the disolored arm and red arrows underneath: "operating room, here".

I was not very excited about the perspective of seeing a mounts of Dutch paintings with dark clothes, and when we crossed the glasspuertas - banking the resounding halls to enter into an enloqueted silence -, the first thing I thought was that we had made a living room.The walls shone with a warm and off opulence, the calm of antiquity;But suddenly everything was sedisolid in clarity, color and pure light of theNotrdic countries, portraits, interiors and lifes, some tiny, other majestic: ladies with husbands, ladies with skirting dogs, lonely beauties with clothing of exquisite embroidery and splendid merchants wrapped jewelry andSkins.Banquet tables after the feast covered with apple mondas and nuts stalls;hanging upholstery and cover of the deplaata;Trapantojos with outwanding insects and browsing flowers.Quantomás we went into the exhibition, the strangest and most beautiful.Peeled lemons, with a slightly reddened peel next to the tip of the knife;The greenish shadow of a little mold.The reflection of light on the edge of a glass of half -empty wine.

"I like this too," my mother whispered, stopping Milado in front of a rather small and particularly a particular nature: a white butterfly against a dark floor, floating overstody red fruit.The background, of an intense black -groomed black, emanated a complex warmth that made you think of crowded warehouses ehistory, the passage of time—.Dutch painters knew how to represent that limit of mature giving way to rot.Lafruta has a perfect appearance but will not last, he is about to pass.And look at this particular fragment ... ".The lower part of the butterfly looked so delicate and powdered that the color would run when touching it—.With what perfection Loplasma. Yonmovilidad en un movimiento trémulo.

"How long took it to paint it?"

My mother, who had approached the painting too much, backed away to contemplate it, outside the security guard with a chewing gum in laboca whose attention had attracted and that stared at her back.

"Well, the Dutch invented the microscope," she replied, ".They were jewelry, lens carriers.They painted everything more detailed because even the smallest things meant something.When you are flies or insects in a dead nature ..., a withered petal or black spot in an apple, the painter is transmitting you a secret mesage.He is telling you that I live it does not last, that all that fellero.Death in life.That is why they are called Natures Mortes, lifes.You may, with all beauty and splendor, input novels the small rot of rot.But if you look more closely, there is.

I leaned down to read the biographical note printed in discreetsleters on the wall, which informed me that the painter - adriaen coore, brat and death -born defects - was unknown while living and his work did not get recognition until the 1950s 1950s.

"Eh, mom, have you seen this?"

but she had already left.In the cold and silent low sidewalks there was no trace of the echo and clamor Palaciegos Delovestibulo main.Although there were enough people seeing the exposure, the quiet air of a winding hast was breathed, an empty packaging;long sighs and excessive exhalations, such as a tanking full of students doing an exam.I followed my mother, who zigzagueaba from one portrait to another: a flower, a card table, fruit of fruits;She moved by exposure to a faster step than the habitual, overlooking many of the paintings (our fourth silver vase or dead pheneman) and heading towards others without hesitation.(«Here is hass.Sometimes it is so sensitive, with all those drunk.But when inspired it is unique.Here you will not find all that accuracy and precision, he paints with the technique of wet wet, zas, zas, and everything is very fast.The faces and hands are embodied with such exquisiteness ... knows what attracts the eye, but look the fabrics, so ethereal, barely outlined.Look open and modern is the brushstroke! "He would be wrong with hair, ”he said stretching my hair from behind) and two great information from Hals of some officers giving a banquet, who escape were very famous and had greatly influenced Rembrandt.(«Van Gogh also loved Hals.Somewhere write over: "Frans Hals uses nothing less than twenty -nine tones of black!".Can they twenty -seven?.Half an hour had almost operated;But I still wanted to entertain her and distract her, with the child.

"Now Rembrandt," my mother continued..It is always said that this subject is about reason and illustration, the dawn of scientific research and others, but it seems to me to chill.Although ... do you see those two decentralized types of the background?They are not looking at the body but an ease.To you and to me.As if they saw us here in front of them, two people of the future, and asked us surprised: "What are being here?".Very naturalist.However… ”he recalled the body with a finger in the air - if you observe it carefully, the body is in a very unnatural way.A strange glow emanates, Laves?It is as if they were practiced an autopsy to an alien.Do you see the faces of the men who are looking at it, like Sibrillara with their own light?He paints it with a radioactive quality because he wants to attract our gaze, attract our attention.And look at this ... ”he pointed out his disoval hand—.Do you see how it relieves it by painting it large and described with respect to the rest of the body?It has even given sink so that the thumb is upside down, do you notice?Well, I missed a mistake.The skin has been torn from the hand, we see it inmediably, here something very serious is happening ..., although when giving the thumb, it seems even more serious, it is detected in waysubliminal ways but we cannot point out what it is, there is something that is something thatNOFUNCIÓ, THAT IS NOT OK.A very skilled trick.—We were behind an Asian tourists and there were so many heads that I barely had to see the painting, although I didn't care much because I had seen the girl.

She had seen me too.We had looked at each other while galleries recreated.I didn't even know what she had of special, since it was not my age and her appearance was a pocochocante;She didn't look like the girls she used to fall in love, serious and cold beauties who looked at you with disdain through the hall and spread with corpulent types.That girl was a redhead;She moved conligereza, and had an angular, spicy and original face, and the eyes of a golden brown brunette.Although it was too skinny, with bony elbows, and in a way not very graceful, something in it removed me inside.Llevaba en bandolera una maltrecha funda de flauta a la que dabagolpecitos…, ¿una chica de ciudad? ¿Yoba a sus clases de música? Quizáno, pensé rodeándola por detrás mientras seguía a mi madre hacia lasiguiente galería; su indumentaria parecía demasiado anodina yaburguesada; seguramente era turista.But he moved with more poise that most of the girls I knew;The serene and peak look that she posed in me as I spent almost touching me up disturbed me.

I followed my mother a little lagging, listening to her halfway, when she stopped so sharply in front of a picture that almost chocécontra the girl.

-Oh I'm sorry…!She exclaimed without looking at me, going back to a step to make a place.

It was as if someone had turned on a light inside his face.

—This is the picture I have spoken to you.Isn't it amazing?

Yoncliné la cabeza hacia ella como si la escuchara con atenciónmientras mi mirada se dirigía de nuevo a la chica.He was accompanied by a white -hair a white -hair that due to the angles of his face was related to her, perhaps her grandfather;He wore a rooster depata jacket, narrow and long laces shoes, lustrous like a mirror.He had his eyes close together, and an Aguileña nose, like Depájaro;She had a little;In fact, his body leaned to the side, because he had a shoulder higher than the other;If his posture had pronounced, he would have said that he was humpback.In spite of everything, emanabaciera elegance.And he was clearly worshiped the young woman, judging by the fun and pleasant expression with which she limited to her side, lending where she put her foot, with her head inclined towards her.

"This is the first picture I fell in love with" said my mother, ".Nolo will believe, but he was in a book that used to get out of the librarian was small.I sat on the floor next to my bed and looked at him for hours, totally fascinated ... that little creature!It is increasing how much you can learn from a picture if you spend a long time observing a reproduction of it, although it is not very good.I started to awk.-I laughed-.The anatomy lesson was in the same book, but I was dreadful.The book was closed when it opened it through that page by mistake.

The girl and the old man had stopped by our side.Self -conscious, I leaned forward and looked at the picture.It was small, the little one of the exhibition, as well as the simplest: a yellow pear on a pale and smooth background, chained by a leg to the hanger on the one that was posing.

"It was Rembrandt student and Vermeer's teacher," my mother continued, ".And this little painting is actually the lost link between the two; in that pure and clear daylight you see where the quality of the light took.Of course, when I was a girl I didn't even know or care about historical.But there it is.

I backed away to look better.It was a small, frank and proud creature, there was nothing sentimental in it;And something in the neat and compact disposition of the wings on the body, the luminosity, the alert and vigilant expression, she reminded me of the photos she had seen as a mimadre when she was a child: a chilguero with a dark head and her gaze.

"It was a famous tragedy in the history of Holland," my mother said, ".Much of the city was destroyed.

-What?

"Delft disaster.Fabritius died there.Haven't you heard how that teacher explained to the children?

Indeed, I had heard it.There were three horrible landscapes of Untant.An informal lady had explained aloud to a collegiate group that around 1600 exploded an endelft gunpowder factory, and that the painter had been so traumatized and obsessed by the destruction of her city that she dedicated himself to painting her again and again.

—Well, Egbert was a neighbor of Fabritius and after the explosion of the Paporín lost his judgment, or at least that is the impression that I have.But Fabritius died and his study was destroyed along with almost all of his paintings except this."My mother seemed to expect me to say something, and see that she didn't, he continued," he was one of the great painters for a while, in one of the most important times of painting, and enjoyed very very fame already in life in life.It is a pity that about his work solos over about five or six paintings.The rest has been lost ... everything he did.

The girl and grandfather were silent on our side by scouting my mother, which gave me a little shame.I diverted, but I was unable to resist and looked again.They were wapering that if I had extended a hand I would have touched them.She threw from the old man's manga, to whisper something in the ear.

"In the end, if you want to know my opinion," said my mother, "this is the most extraordinary puzzle of all the exhibition.Fabritius transmitsalgo who discovered on his own and that no painter who preceded him knew, not even Rembrandt.

Very short, so much that I heard her hard, the girl whispered:

"Did you live like this all your life?"

I had wondered the same;the leg with shackle, the terriblecadena;His grandfather murmured an answer, but my mother (who looked like them completely, although they were by our side) went back and said:

"It's such a mysterious picture, so simple ... really tender ... teinvita to look more closely, right?"After all those Faisanesmuertos that we have left behind, this little living creature appears.

I allowed myself to launch another furtive look at the girl.I was supported on one leg, with a hip to the side.Then unexpectedly he turned and looked me in the eye;In an instant of confusion, I look away.

What was it called?Why was she not at school?I had intended to read the scribened name in the case of his flute, but even when I leaned as much as possible without being noticed, the daring pointed strokes of marker were more deepened than of calligraphy, like a spray painted in a wagon in a wagon.The last name was short, it only had four or five letters;Laprimera looked like R, was it a P?

"People die, that's clear," my mother said at that time, ".But the loss of certain objects is so tragic and unnecessary ... for a carelessness.In fires and wars.Like the part, they used as a gunpowder warehouse.I guess everything we achieved from history is a miracle.

The grandfather had advanced and was a few -distance away;But the girl laughed a few steps, and continued looking at my mother and me.I had a beautiful complexion, white, and arms like chiseled in marble.His appearance was all athletic, although he was too pale to be a stop player;Maybe she was a dancer or gymnast, or even springboard, practicing late in the afternoon in dark tile pools in shadows, echoes and refractions.Throwing to the water with the arched speech and the feet in tip, a silent dive, the black elverer shining between the bubbles that formed and fell from supequeño and tense body.

Why did you get obsessed with people in that way?Was it normal to strangers in such an intense and feverish way?Probably not.It was hard for me.And yet, that was the main work that I had entered with those houses: I was fascinated by the unknown.I wanted to know what they ate and in what dishes, what movies they had and what music they listened to, I wanted to look under their beds, in secret swillings, in their nightdies at night and in their work pockets.I often saw people with interesting appearance and thought in them tirelessly for days, imagining my life, they inventing stories about them in the subway or on the urban bus.Despite the years, he still thought of the children of black and uniform hair of Catholic school - brother and sister - he had seen at the Grand Central station, trying to get his father out of the American mangas of the American of a sordid bar of a sordid bar of a sordid bar.Nor had he forgotten the fragile girl of stirred appearance that he had in a wheelchair in front of the Carlyle hotel, speaking in Italian with the soft and fluffy dog that had in the lap, while an elegant individual with sunglasses (his father?A bodyguard?), Standing behind her, did she do a business bearing business.For years I had thought about them, wondering who those strangers and how their lives were, and at that time I knew I would go home and ask me the same questions about that girl and about grandfather.The old man had money;He showed in his way of dressing.What were the two alone?Where were they from?Perhaps they were part of a large and complicated family of New York;People from the academic world ODE music, one of those pseudo -artistic families of the West Side Queveías for Columbia or in the morning concerts of the Lincoln Center.It is time, judging by how pleasant and civilized the old man looked like, it was not her grandfather but a music teacher, and she was the flutistaprodigio that he had discovered and taken to Carnegie Hall to do to do ...

"Theo, have you heard me?"My mother asked suddenly, and her voice made her become aware of myself.

We were in the last room of the exhibition.Beyond the store - festals, the cash register and ribs of satin paper - and my mother, unfortunately, had not lost tanism of time.

"We would have to go see if it keeps raining.We still have a little time ... ”he looked at the clock and then above me towards the exit electter - but I think it is better than I already goes down if I want to buy Mathilde for Mathilde.

I realized that the girl watched my mother as she spoke..Had he set in the small bulge that my mother had at the top of the nose, where she had broken her when she fell from a tree when she was small?Or in the black circles that surrounded the pale blue iris of her eyes, they gave the wild appearance of a lonely hunting creature with a fixed lame in a plain?

-You know…?"My mother looked over her shoulder.".If you don't care, I would like to enter before we left and take another look at the anatomy lesson.I have not managed to see it closely and I fear that I cannot return before Lodescuelguen."He runs away, with his shoes replaceing on the floor, and looked back, as if saying" Do you come? ".

@Naija_PR Everything is clearly stated in Yoslam including how to eat, drink, sleep etc..... Terms ke essence ni 😂

— KONGO REP. 🙌 Sat Apr 24 15:41:05 +0000 2021

It was so unexpected that for a moment I did not know what to say.

"Hum, I wait for you in the store," I replied, recovering.

-Agree.Buy me a couple of postcards, do you want?I immediately come back."And she rushed before I could say something.

With my heart throbbing me strongly, without being able to believe in Misuerte, I watched her as she left quickly with her rasoblanco gabardina.That was my chance to talk to the girl.But what can I say? I thought furious.What can I talk to her?She sank her hands in her pockets and took a couple of times to calm down;With stomach stomach by emotion, I turned to her.

But, to my misfortune, the girl had gone.Rather, I reached his head crossing at reluctantly (or so it seemed to me) Lasala.His grandfather had intertwined his arm with his, whispering his ear with great enthusiasm, and took her from there to look some picture of the opposite wall.

I would have killed him.Nervous, I looked towards the empty door.I sank themen even more in the pockets and - with the burning face - I began to cross it room in its entire length in a striking way.The minors passed;My mother would return at any time;And although I knew well that I had the courage to make my way to the girl and tell him something, he could take a last look.I had recently left me late watching Kane citizen with my mother, and I was obsessed with the idea that a person could look at a fascinating unknown that passed and remember her the rest of her life.Someday I would also be like the old man of the film and deserved with his eyes lost in the chair, saying: «Do you know?That was sixty years old, and I never saw that redhead again.But lessegrus that since then has not been a month when she has not thought about her ".

I had already crossed more than half of the gallery when something a former externa happened.A security guard ran down the open door of the store that was at the bottom of the exhibition.He wore his arms something.

The girl also saw it.His golden brown eyes met mine;A question question and startled.

Suddenly another guard ran out of the store.He had his arms raised and shouted something.

The heads rose.Behind me someone with a strange vozapada exclaimed an "Oh!".After a moment, a terrible explosion was shook the room.

The old man, perplexed, staggered to the side, with an arm and the knots extended fingers;He was the last thing I remembered to see.Almost just at the same time there was a black glow that I saw debris flying through the air and swirling them around me, and in the middle of a roar of scorching wind I saw myself thrown through Lasala.And that was the last of what I was aware.

V

I don't know how long I was unconscious.When he regained knowledge I thought I was mouth of the sand drawer of a parkinfantil that did not know, in some desert neighborhood.I am around a group of hard -looking boys who kicked me in the tasks and in the back of the head.I had a crooked neck on a side and I lacked breath, but that was not the worst: there was anana in my mouth and I breathed through it.

The boys murmured in a audible voice:

"Get up, Capullo".

«Look at it, look at it."

«It doesn't know a pijo."

I turned around and threw my arms above my head and - with an unreal shaking, illusory - I saw that there was no one there.

For a moment I was lying, too stunned to move.Alarms sounded damping because of distance.For strange it seems like, I had the impression of being in the garden upholstered with some urbanization left of the hand of God.

Someone had given me a beating.The whole body hurt, I had ground ribs and hammered my head as if it wip was beaten with a lead pipe.While opening and closed lamandibula, I took my hands to my pockets looking for the bill to return home;Then I realized that I didn't know where I was.I was lying rigidly, becoming aware of something out of place.The light was not the appropriate one, like the air, acre and dense, a chemical mist that caused me stinging degarganta.The texture of the gum in my mouth was granulosa, and when, with my head about to explode, I turned my face to score it, I found myself blinking through layers of smoke in a strange place that took a while to react for a while to react.

I was in a white and rugged cave whose roof hung and garlands.The ground was demolished and covered with lots of allegation similar to the lunar rock, and everywhere there were crystals and gravel, as well as a wake of helmet, bricks, scum and pale scattered scattered, covered with a thin layer of ash that remembered a first frost.About my head shone a pair of delay through dust, like the crooked headlights of a car in Laniebla, one turned up and the other to the side, projected biased.

My ears rumbled, as well as the whole body, with intensely disturbing unasensation;Bones, brain, heart, mevibrated like a bell.From a distant place, very weak, the mechanical gemide of an alarm, firm and impersonal arrived.I couldn't know if theruid sounded inside or outside me.He had a strong sensation of a winter lethargenation.Everything was incoherent around me.

In the midst of a rubble waterfall, with one hand supported by a superficie that was not entirely vertical, my face of pain was twisted by the strong migraine.In the inclination of the place where I was something deep and inherently wrong.At one end floated a motionless and dense layer of smoke and dust.In the other, a tangle of crushed materials descended on a slope where the roof should have been.

My jaw hurt;He had his face and knees full decorts, and he noticed my mouth like sandpaper.Flashing a tennis shoe before the chaosdistinguí;lots of brittle materials of dirty color;A twisted aluminum cane.It was starting atamatheing, suffocated and dizzy, without knowing where to go or what to do, when I suddenly seemed to hear the sound of a phone.

For a moment I was not sure;I listened carefully and to the Pocorate he sounded again: weak and persistent, a little strange.I looked for contours between the rubble, knocking down bags and dusty backpacks, pushing out of burning objects and pieces of glass, more and more prepared by the way in which the debris gave up under my feet in my feet, and for the soft and inert packages that were inLos Limites de my visual field.

Even after convincing myself that I had not heard a phone and in what my ears had played a bad pass, continued, registering with the thoughtless intensity of a robot.Between Blessed, Bags, Wallets, broken glasses, Electronic Keys, Polveras, Atomizer perfumes and prescription medications (Roitman, Andrea, Alprazolam of 0.25 mg), I dig a keychain-lunternay a mobile that did not work (half loaded and without barsof coverage), and I threw them in a folding nylon bag for the purchase that I found in a lady's bag.

I threw like a fish, half suffocated because of the plaster dust, and the head that I barely saw it hurt so much.I wanted to sit but I didn't have to do it.

Suddenly I saw a bottle of water.My gaze turned back and walked through chaos until I saw her again, about fifteen feet, half buried under a lot of helmet;Only the hint of a label, of a blue tone that was familiar to me.

With a numbness of heaviness, as if I moved by lanieve, I started to make way with great effort through the students, listening to how the helmet broke out under my feet concruited similar to the noise of the ice of the ice of the ice of ice.But I had not moved away much, with the corner of the eye, I perceived a movement on the ground that mell me attention in the middle of stillness, a white overtime flash.

I stopped.Then I approached a few more steps.He was a man, lying on his back and white head dust.He was so well -known among the ruins covered with ash that it took a moment to clearly endary his silhouette;Chalk on chalk, striving to be porincorported as a statue demolished from a pedestal.While I was, I saw that he was old and very fragile, with a kind of humpback;his hair - or what he had left of him - had been stiff;Even side of the face had ugly burns, and the head, by enciming an ear, was a viscous black horror.

I had approached where he was when - unpaid - his arm covered with white dust shot and grabbed Lamano.Panic dam, I backed away, although he grabbed me more strongly, coughing incessantly with a sickly mucus.

"Where…?"I just asked.". ¿Dónde…?"

He tried to look at me, but his head hung on his neck and tan the chin resting on his chest, so he was forced to love me below my eyebrows like a vulture.But in that rostroked his eyes were intelligent and were full of despair.

"My God," I said, bending down to help him, "wait, wait ..." I stop without knowing what to do.

The man had the lower half of the crooked body in the Solocomo a lot of dirty clothes.He leaned on his arms in a way that gave me brios.Detached stench to burned hair, to burn wool.But the inferior part of his body seemed separated from the superior, and he coughed and fell backwards.

I looked around trying to orient myself, disturbed by the blow I had received in the head, without notion of time or whether it was day night.The greatness and desolation of space baffled me;The elevated and unique height, with different gradations of smoke as they are decapitable and swelling with the entangled effect of a campaign store should be the roof (or the sky).But although I had no ideade where I was or why, there I was still floating the accident of the accident, a kinematic load in the dazzling light of the emergency lamps.On the Internet he had seen shots of a hotel volando in the air in the desert, where the labyrinth of the habits at the time of collapse had remained frozen in a burst of similar light.

Suddenly I remembered the water.I went back, looking around, and turned my heart to see the dusty blue flash.

"Look," I said, moving away from him..I'm just going to…

The old man watched me with a look at the same time hopeful and desperate, like a hungry dog too weak to walk.

-Do not wait.I immediately come back.

I gave tumbos like a drunk through the helmet, walking condifying above objects that reached my knees, making my way between bricks, cement, shoes, bags and all kinds of carbonized remains that I did not want to see too much.

The bottle, full in three quarters, was hot.But Alprimer drink my throat seized my will and when I wanted to give me, I had already drunk more than half - with plastic flavor and warm the water to wash the dishes;I forced myself to cover it and save it in the bag to take it to the old man.

I knelt by his side.I noticed how my stones are nailed to my knees.He shiver, and his breathing was rough and irregular;She had not sought mine but wandered above her until she noted worried about something I didn't see.

I struggled to open the bottle when he extended a hand when my face.With his old bony fingers and the pillows of the sides of the flat fingers he delicately removed my hair from my eyes and started a piece of glass of the eyebrow;Then she gave me a palmaditas in my head.

-Go Go.His voice sounded very weak, hoarse and cordial, with a horrible whistle that came out of the lungs.

We looked at each other for a long and strange moment that never heavily, like two animals that are at sunset, and a clear spark of sympathy seemed to sprout;I saw the creature that was reality and I think he also saw me.For a moment we were connected as two engines of the same circuit.Then he fell towardsatrás, so inert that I thought he had died.

"Tome," I said awkwardly, putting a hand below the shoulder..It's good.—To his head was the best I could and I helped him the bottle.He only took a sip and almost everything was slid by the chin.

Again fell backwards.The effort had been excessive.

"Pippa," he said in a thick voice.

I looked down at his red and burned face, moved by something that I was familiar to me in his clear dark reddish eyes.I had it before.And I had also seen the girl, the shortest snapshot, with the brilliant luminosity of an autumn leaf: reddish -colored eyebrows, golden brown eyes.Her face was reflected in his.Where was the girl?

He tried to say something.The quartered lips moved.I wanted to know where Pippa was.

Resolving and struggling to breathe.

"I proceed still," I said, agitated.

"She should take the train, it's much faster.Unless someone takes her by car.

"Don't worry," I said, approaching me.I was not worried.Soon someone would come to help us, I was sure—.I will wait until they come.

-You are very kind.—The hand (cold and dry as dust) closed the mine—.I hadn't seen you again since you were a child.You were all about an adult the last time we talk.

"But I'm Theo," I said, after a moment of confusion.

-Of course."His look, like her hand's squeery, was firm Yafable.".And I'm sure you've made a great choice.Mozartes much more beautiful than Gluck, don't you think?

I did not know what to say.

"It will be easier for both.They are very hard with you in theAuditions ... ".With bright lips of blood, thick and red—.They don't give you a second chance.

"Waste ..." I didn't seem good to let me confuse me with another.

—But both together you play it wonderfully well.The Solmayor.I don't stop hearing it in my head.So light, just a touch ... ”” A few inaccurate notes murmured.A song.It was a song—.I will have already told you, but when I took piano lessons in the house of the old woman Armenia there was a green lizard living in lapalmera, green like a lettuce.I loved watching it ... how the sinker appeared ..., the colored lights in the garden ... du Pays Saint ..., it took twenty minutes to travel it on foot but they looked like miles ...

He went out for a moment;I noticed how her mind was moving away, swirling like a sheet in a stream until she looked away.Then he varied on the shore and was there again.

-And you?How old are you now?

-Thirteen.

"And you go to the French Lyceum?"

"No, my school is at the West Side.

"I better what better.".All those classes in French!It is too vocabulary for a child.Nom et pronom, species and filum.It is just a way of collecting insects.

"How do you say?"

"They always spoke French in the Groppi.Do you remember the Groppi?With striped umbrella and pistachio ice cream?

«Stripe umbrella." Me costaba pensar con el dolor de cabeza.I looked up until it stops it in the long cut that he had on the scalp, dark and coagulated, similar to an ax wound.It was increasingdarkness in which you could float, had a lethargic quality, a foamy wake that swirled and disappeared into a cold oceanonegro.

Suddenly something was wrong.He was awake and shook me.He stirred his hands.I wanted something.He tried to join with an overwhelming inhalation.

-What happens?I asked, making a great effort to keep me alert.

He panted stirred, throwing my arm.Scared, I stood and look around waiting.

Taking my hand.Squeezing it strongly.

"There didn't," he said.

"How do you say?"

"Don't leave it.".Not."I looked beyond me, trying to point out something.".Take it from there.

"I want, please.

—¡No!Not deben verlo."I grabbed my frantic arm, try to join.".They have stolen the carpets, they will take him to the LaDuana warehouse ...

I saw that he pointed a dusty wood rectangle that was barely severe between the shattered beams and the debris, smaller than the portable organizer that I had at home.

-That?I asked, looking at him more closely.It was covered wax tasts and had an irregular mosaic of labels that were informed—.Does it refer to that?

-I beg you.He gave his eyes tightly.He noticed altered, and he coughed so much that he could barely speak.

I lengthened a hand and picked up the wood from the ground by grabbing it by theBords.It was surprisingly heavy for size.In a corner a long broken frame.

I passed the sleeve on the dusty surface.A tiny yellow bird, barely visible under a layer of white dust.«The anatomy lesson was in the same book, but I was dreadful."

«Bien", respondí lánguidamente.I returned with the picture in my hand to show it to her and then I realized that I was not there.

Or ... was and wasn't.Part of her was there, but it was invisible.The invisible part was the important.That was something I had never understood.But when he tries to say it aloud the words were wocked, and as if I received a slap I understood burning.Both parties had to be united.Not podíastener una sin la otra.

I passed my arm on my forehead and tried to blink to take away the eye dust;With bold effort, as if lifting heavy cups, I tried to concentrate my mind on what I knew I had to think.Where was my mother?For an instant we had three and one of them, he was quite sure, he had been.But now we were both.

Behind me, the old man had started coughing and thicifying a denuevo with an uncontrollable urgency, trying to speak.I tried to stop the painting.

"Tome," I said. Y volviéndome hacia mi madre, o hacia el lugar donde ella parecía haber estado, añadí—:I immediately come back.

But it wasn't the picture what he wanted.Anxious, it was returned by mocking something.On the right side of the head hung him a sample blood that his ear looked hard.

-Excuse me?"I replied, still thinking about my mother ... where was she?".How do you say?

-Take it away.

"Look, I immediately come back.I have to ... "I couldn't confess it, not delight, but my mother wanted me to go home immediately.Sesupony that I had to meet her there, that was the only thing that she had made clear.

-Take it with you!He shouted, pushing him against me..Go away! "He tried to join.He had bright and exorbitant eyes;suagitation scared me—.All bulbs have been taken, half of the street houses have collapsed ...

He ran a drop of blood down his chin.

"Please," I said with trembling hands, fearful of touching it..Please, be ...

He shook his head and tried to say something, but the effort made him depressing way.When his mouth dried up, I saw a red stripe of blood on the back of his hand.

-Someone is coming."Not very sure if I believed him and without knowing what to say, he looked at my face looking for some glimpse of understanding, and when he did not find it, he tried to join again,".Fire, ”he added, in a guttural voice—.THE SAWLLA DE MAADI.On tout forgive.

Had another cough attack.Of the nostrils was foamed with red.In the midst of that unreality of shattered monoliths and piled up I had the feeling of having failed him, as if he had failed by clumsiness and ignorance in a crucial mission.Although there was no fire in that scenario of rubble, I pissed off to the painting and kept it in the Nylon bag just to apply for his sight, since he disturbed him so much.

"Don't worry," I said, ".The…

He had calmed down.He put a hand on my wrist with my eyes and bright eyes, and a cold wind of irrationality blew on me.I had done what I had to do.Everything would go well.

While I was comforting me with that idea, I squeezed my encouraging hand, as if I had spoken out loud.

"They'll get us out of here," he said.

-I know.

—Cley it on newspaper, boy, and put it at the bottom of the trunk, with the other objects.

Relieved to see that he had reassured and accusing the tired.Removed, absent.Eldivaga a little quietly.Notmbres extranjeros, sumas y cifras, unascuantas palabras en francés pero la mayoría en inglés. Yoba a venir unhombre para mirar los muebles.Abdou was in a tightened for throwing.And yet everything made sense somehow;I saw the depalmer garden, the piano and the green lizard on the comosi tree trunk will be the pages of a photo album.

«¿Sabrás volver solo a casa?", recuerdo que me preguntó en algún momento.

-Of course."I was lying beside her on the ground, with a lacabeza at the same level as her old man and sternum resolving, so that every whistle of her breathing—.Every day I take the Yosolo train.

"And where have you said you lived now?"—He had put a hand in the head very delicately, like caressing a dog you want.

—In fifty -seven street this.

-Oh yeah!Near Le See d’Or?

"A few apples.".

LE VEAU D’OR was a restaurant that my mother liked to go when we had money.There I had eaten my first escargot and taken my first Sorbo from Marc de Bourgogne of his cup.

"Hacia Park?"

"No, closer to the river.

"It's close enough.".Meringues and caviar.How I liked this city the first time I saw her!But it is no longer the same.I miss it a lot.You do not? El balcón, y el…

-Garden.

I turned to him.Perfumes and melodies.In the Ciénaga de Miconfusion he had come to believe that he was an intimate friend or a member of the family who did not remember, a relative of my lost mother was very time ...

"Oh, your mother!"What a beauty!I will never forget the first time I came to play.She was the most beautiful young she had ever seen.

How did he know that I was thinking about her?I asked hisabía where she was at that moment, but she had fallen asleep.He had his eyes closed although he breathed quickly and brokenly, as if fleeing something.

I was sleeping myself - with a stupid beep in the ears an ears and metallic taste in my mouth, as if I were in the dentist - and may have ended up plunging me into unconsciousness and remained in her if he had not shaken me at some time with so much with so muchForce that I woke up with a panic wave.Something murmurs, pulling its index.The ring was removed, a heavy gold ring with a carved stone, and tried to give me it.

"Listen, I don't want it," I said, scared..What does it give it to me for?

But he put it in the palm of the hand.His panting breathing was unpleasant.

"Hobart and Blackwell," he added with a voice that seemed to drown inside..Touch the green bell.

"The green bell," I repeated, undecided.

He swing his head from one side to another stunned, withotalous lips.Had a lost look.When he posed her without vermesentí a chill.

"Tell Hobie to get out of there," he said in a thick voice.

Yoncrédulo, observé cómo le brotaba un hilillo de sangre brillantede la comisura de la boca.He had loosen his tie by pulling her.

"Wait," I said, leaning to help him.

But he turned away my hands.

"What closes the box and starts!"She resolved, ".His father has sent some guys to beat him up ...

He put his eyes blank and blinked.Then he collapsed on symism as if he had emptied completely air;For a few or forty seconds he lay like a lot of old clothes, until, so abruptly that I shive.He supported the best thing on his elbows, and for another thirty seconds or less he hastaking it with sufficient force would secure.

-It's okay?I asked, desperate, on the verge of tears—.Can you hear me?

While struggling and shooking - which fish out of the water -, lesostuve alto my head, or I tried, without knowing how to do it and the tester of hurting him, while he clung my hand in all as if he hung from a building and was about toof falling.Cadarespiration was an isolated and gorgoteante gasp, a heavy piedralevantada with terrible effort and thrown again and again to the ground.I had a moment he looked me in the eye, with his mouth full of blood, and he appeared that he told me something, but the words just borboteted by Labarbilla.

I saw with great relief that was getting quieter, moreilenious;The force with which my hand grabbed my hand, Sedesvanecía, gave the impression that it sank, almost as if it moved around the water on the water.

-It's better?I asked, and then ...

Be careful, I dropped some water in his mouth and his lips, I saw them move;Then, on his knees like the servant servant, I cleaned the blood of his face with the cashmir handkerch.While he was allowed to go - in different sneakers and latitudes - towards immobility, I threw myself back on Lostalones and examined his unleashed expression carefully.

-Listen?

A eyelid like parchment, half closed, trembled in a bluish veins tic.

"If he hears me, get your hand.".

But the hand that held between mine was inert.I have been looking at him, not knowing what to do.It was time to leave, it was a long time that I should have done it - my mother had left him very much - and yet I didn't see any exit in the space where I found me;In fact, in some sense I had a hard time imagining in another part of the world, in another world outside that.It was as if he had never had another life.

"Do you hear me?"I asked, leaning closer to him and bringing the ear to her bloody mouth.

But there was no answer.

VYo

I didn't want to bother him if he was just resting, so I liked to make the least possible noise when I got up.I was a momentomir while cleaning my hands in the jacket of the school;He was covered with his blood and had sticky hands;LuegonconTo the lunar landscape of helps tried to guide me and decide where to go.

When, with great difficulty, I made my way to the center of the Spanish - or what I thought was the center - I saw that there was a door after a rubble curtain;I turned back and started contrary endirection.There the lintel had detached himself, leaving a mountain of bricks almost as high as me and a space full of human in the upper part, large enough to pass a car.I started climbing, opening myself painfully above and around the cement helmet, but I hadn't moved away much when I mepercatized that I had to go in the other direction.On the walls of Loque had been the museum store there were small flames sizzling and sparking in the dark, some of them burned very well from the level where the ground should have been.

I did not like the appearance of the other door (spotted rubber cluster; the tip of a man shoe protruding from a dirt mountain), but at least most of the material that the obstruct was very solid.Timbing again, dodging cables that threw from the roof, I hung the bag on my shoulder and breathed deeply to throw myself right towards the rubble.

I noticed that I was drowning with the dust and intense smell of chemical scares.Coughing and praying so that there were no more current cables hanging, I groped in the dark while all kinds of rubble on my eyes: gravel, pieces of plaster, chops and fragments of something unknown.

Some of the construction materials were light, others not.The more I got into the dark, the greater the heat was.Occasionally, the road shrunk or blocked unexpectedly, and in miso echoested the bustle of a crowd that could not place.I had to make myself between objects, and as soon as I was crawling, perceiving that seeing the bodies between the ruins, a disturbing task that gave way under my weight;But the worst of all was the stench: to cloth, to carbonized hair and meat, and the taste of fresh blood, mixture of copper, brass and salt.

I made cuts in my hands and knees.I slipped around and around objects opening my mind, bordering the hip a kind of elongated or beam, until a masses that seemed like a wall prevented me from continuing.With difficulty, because the space was narrow, I surrounded it and introduced a hand in the bagabuscand something to illuminate me.

I wanted the keychain-in the back.I turned it on and almost Alintesto fell out of my hands, because in the light of the VI Lamano screen of a man appearing between two pieces of cement. Yonclusoaterrado como estaba, recuerdo que agradecí que solo fuera una mano, apesar de que los dedos tenían un aspecto hinchado, oscuro y carnoso quenunca he logrado olvidar; todavía hoy doy un respingo cuando un mendigode la calle alarga una mano igual de abotargada y con un cerco negroalrededor de las uñas.

I still had the keychain in the bag, although now I wanted.I projected a tremulous light in the cavity where I was, but when I recovered just to bend and pick it up from the ground, Lapalla went out, which produced a greenish postcom effect on the blackness that I had before me.I put on all fours and crawl in the dark, grabbing with my hands to helps and glass, resolved to find it.

I thought I knew more or less where I was, so I continued looking for him, perhaps more time, because when I finally gave up and tried to keep me again, I realized that I had introduced myself in a sunk one where it was impossible to stand up, with a surface surfaceabout three inches on my head.It was useless to turn over;So I decided to continue advancing to cats, trusting in sooner or later it would end up opening, and then I found myself very slowly with my head tilted, and a feeling of imprisonment and despair.

When I was about four years old, I was partially trapped in a folding bed on our floor of the seventh avenue, but that it could have been a funny journey it was not reallyHeard my drowned screams and I would have taken me from. Yontentar maniobrar en ese espacio sin aire, rodeado de cristalesrotos, metal ardiendo, el hedor a ropa quemada y de vez en cuando algoblando que hacía presión sobre mí y en lo que no quería pensar, era algoparecido o peor.The rubble fell heavily from above;I had the throat full of dust and coughed non -stop, and the pamination entered me seemed to distinguish the rough texture of the bricks parties surrounded me.A ray of light - the weakest imaginable - entered my left, about six inches from the ground level.

I dodged even more and found myself looking at the dark tiles of the gallery that was beyond.Piled up on the ground I saw what a rescue team seemed to be (ropes, axes, levers, a oxygen -a -linker in which the initials of the body of New York was read).

-Hello?"I shouted without waiting for an answer, twisting to slide as fast as possible through the hole.

The space was narrow;If he had had a few years or heavy more perhaps he would not have fit.In the middle of the way my bag hooks with something and for a moment I thought I would have to release it, with Osin painting, like a lizard that emerges from its tail.But I gave a last pull and released a shower of crumbled plaster.By enciming me there was a kind of beam that seemed to hold a lot of construct heavierial, and while I drained under it, Isentí terrified in case I slipped and cut me into two, until I burned that someone had underpinned her with acar cat.

Once outside, I got up with difficulty, tearful and stunned with relief.

-Hello?—I shouted again, wondering why there was so much equipment formed everywhere if there was no firefighter in sight.

The gallery was little illuminated but it was mostly in the most part, with vaporous layers of smoke that became denser when rising.However, only for the lights and security cameras, which was intorned and turned to the ceiling, it was noted that some terrriblela force had gone through.I was so euphoric to find myself again in an open space that it took a couple of minutes to realize it strangely that I was the only person standing in a room full of people.Except me, everyone was lying.

On the ground there were at least a dozen people, not alliles.Gave the impression that they had fallen from a great height.Three or four of the bodies were partially covered firefighter shells, with their feet by below.Others were full view in the midst of explosive brands.Splashes and jets transmitted violence, such as gigantic blood sneeze, a hysterical sense of movement in the midst of immobility.I was in particular recorded a medium -sized lady who wore a blouse with a fabergé egg print that could have bought in the same museum store, dotted with blood.Susgoes - perfilated with a thick stripe - looked at the inexpressive roof, and without doubt their tan was a boat, since he had the skin of a healthy peach -walloon, despite the fact that he lacked the top of the lacabeza.

Dark oils, opaque gold.Staggering a tantodesconcertado, I went with small steps to the center of the room.I heard the same noise from my own breathing, strangely superficial, with a light note of a nightmare.Not quería mirar pero tuveque hacerlo.There was an Asian, pathetic little man with his hunter chart, curled up in the middle of a pool of blood, and a guardian guard (whose uniform was the most recognizable in him, because he had serious squeals on his face) with a crooked arm behind his back and cottonaginable cottonsprayed where his leg should have been.

But the main thing, the most important thing, was that none of the people lying there was her.I forced myself to look at them all, one by one - even when I did not see myself with the strength of examining their faces, I knew the feet of my mother, the clothes I wore, the white ynegro bicolor shoes - and long after having made sure, I forced myself tostay in the middle of the bodies, folded on myself like a pigeanferma with my eyes closed.

In the adjoining gallery, more dead: three.A thick man with a rhombus vest;an old woman full of ulcers;A Tezlechosa girl with a scratch in the temple but otherwise unharmed.And suddenly there was no more.I toured several galleries full of scattered equipment (and with blood stains on the ground), but I didn't see more corpses.When I entered the gallery in such a distant appearance where she had been, wing that had gone, the Anatomy Lesson Room, and closed them with force asking for a desire, I only found the same stretchers and the team.While crossing her, in the strangely pending silence, the only eyes that stuck in me were those of the bewildered Dutch that had looked at my mother and missionly from the wall: what are you doing here?

Suddenly something changed.I don't even remember how it happened;I was in a different place and ran through rooms where there.Shortly before I seemed to me that the galleries followed a straight curly, a serpenting but logical sequence where all the affluents led to the gift of gift objects.But alleging them again at a fast pace, in the opposite direction, I fell into a lacuenta that the road was far from being straight;And again and again I bump empty walls and put me in without exit rooms.The doors and the entities were not where I hoped to find them;The pedestals arose nothing.When folding a corner maybe too abrupt Casichoqué with a group of frans hass guards: corpulent types and red cheeks, sleepy men.They looked at me coldly, with penetrating eyes and mocking, as I recovered, I backed down and was running again.

Yoncluso cuando todo iba bien, a veces me ponía nervioso en elmuseo (deambulando sin rumbo por las galerías de arte de Oceanía, entretótems y piraguas), y tenía que acercarme a un guardia para pedirle queme indicara la salida.The painting galleries were particularly confuses, as they reorganized them frequently;While running the empty halls in that ghostic gloomgoric I felt more and more scared.I thought I knew how to go to the main staircase, but Alpono a long time to go out to the galleries of special exhibitions everything began to be very little familiar;After running dizzy for a minutes folding corners that I did not know, I understood that I had lost. De algún modo me había abierto paso a través de las obrasmaestras italianas (Cristos crucificados y santos asombrados, serpientesy ángeles enzarzados en luchas) hasta terminar en la Yonglaterra desiglo XVYoYoYo, una parte del museo que rara vez visitaba y apenas conocía.Before me, long visual lines were extended, elegant llabering corridors that created the illusion of being in an enchanted mansion: lords with wig, cold beauties of Gainsborough watching with disdain agitation.The stately perspectives were exasperating, because they did not appear to lead the staircase or any of the main corridors to other majestically lordly male galleries all the same;I was on the verge of tears when I suddenly saw a discreet door in a gallery wall.

You had to look twice to see it, since it was the same color that the walls;The door class that in normal circumstances would keep locked.The only reason he caught my attention was not well closed: the left side stood out from Laparad;I did not know if it was due to an oversight or that the lock was not softed because of a light cut.Still it was not easy for me to open it;Being made of steel weigh a lot, and I had to push with all misfuerzas.Suddenly, with a pneumatic resolve, the door yielded, taninesperably, that I staggered.

I crossed it and went out to a dark office hall with a very low roof.There the emergency lights were more faint than in the main lagalería, and my eyes took a while to adapt.

The hall seemed to be extended along miles.Scared, I advanced little by little, glimpse.Cameron Geisler, secretary.Miyakofujita, Undersecretary.Open drawers and remote chairs.On a threshold I saw a heeled shoe lying side.

The abandonment air was indescribably chilling.Lolejos seemed to hear police mermaid.My confusion was increasingly not having seen any firefighter, police or security guard;de chilo, not a single living soul.

The authorized personnel only was not dark enough to light the keychain, but there was not enough light to see well.I was in a kind of warehouse or file.Lasparedes of the offices were covered from the ground to the roof dearchivators and metal shelves with plastic boxes and cardboard for the response.The narrowness of the hall made me nervous, as if I would be, and my steps resonated in such an demential way that in a pair deocasion I stopped and I turned to see if someone followed me.

-Hello?"I shouted without great conviction, glimposing some of the doors when she passed.

Several of the offices were modern and Spartan;Others were listed and had a dirty appearance, with messy lots of thepeles and books.

Florens Klauner, Departamento de Yonstrumentos Musicales; MauriceOrabi-Roussel, Arte Yoslámico; Vittoria Gabetti, Textiles.I passed through a huge and dark room with a long work table where there were frights of uneven fabric scattered like the pieces of unromabezas.In the background, a confusion of hangers with wheels with those seen next to the service elevators of Bendel Obergdorf, of which many plastic bags for devestir garments.

At the intersection I looked on either side without knowing what direction.It smelled of soil wax, water and chemical substances, and also ahumo.The offices and workshops extended in all directions until the infinite;A geometric network contained, fixed and bland.

To my left I blinked the light of a lamp on the roof.He built and fluctuated in an explosion of static, and in the tremuloresplandor I saw a source of drinking water at the bottom of the hall.

I ran to her - so quickly that my feet were almost sneaky under me - and, closing my lips around the pitorro, drinking frozen water so quickly that I felt a stab of pain in the temple.Between hypos, I washed my blood, I threw water in my eyes down and put my head under the jet.Small crystals - almost visible - played at the base of the fountain, shining on elcer like ice needles.

I leaned on the wall.The fluorescent of the roof - which vibrated, lit and turned off with a sizzling - filled me with aliestud.With great effort I stood again;I started again, wandering under the hesitant light.Everything was resolutely more industrial on that side: wooden pallets, a flat base wheelbarrow, objects inside packaging drawers that gave the impression of filing and stored. Pasé por otra intersección de la quearrancaba un pasadizo envuelto en sombras que se perdía en la oscuridad,y me disponía a pasar de largo cuando vi al final un resplandor rojo enel que se leía SALYoDA.

I stumbled and fell;I got up again, still with hiccup, and shorten for the endless corridor.At the bottom of this there was a port of a metal bar, such as school's security doors.

I pushed her with a scream.I ran down a dark staircase; twelve steps, a turn in the landing and many other steps to the elphinal, touching with the fingertips the metal railing, the shoes replacewith me.At the foot of the stairs, an institutional gray hall was with another door with a bar.I threw me and opened it with my hands;I felt the cold slap of Lalluvia on her face and the deafening howl of the sirens.

I was so glad to be outside that it is possible that I shout, although I would not have heard me in the midst of that rumble;She could have shouted for a reaction engines on the guard of the Guard in full.It was as if all patrol cars, firefighters, ambulances and emergency vehicles of five districts apart fromone.

Central Park had left through a side door located between the loading and download springs.The sidewalks looked empty in the gray -green distance, and the treetops, snow -covered, shaken and ravaged the wind.Beyond, on the street swept by the rain, Laquinta Avenida was obstructed.From where I was enough to see the great activity bombardment through the downpour: cranes and equipment, police officers go back to the crowd, red lights, light lights and blue, flashes that vibrated, swirling and talked in the volatile confusion.

I lifted my elbow to protect my face from the rain and shorten through the empty parking lot.The rain fell on my forehead and got into my eyes, melting the lights of the avenue in a blurred a bass.

There were vans parked from the police and firefighters in New York, with the Fabric Fabrisas Enmarcha: the K-9 units, the rescue operations battalion, Hazat's elequipo.Black waterproof struggled and swelled alviento.A yellow ribbon extended from one end to another from the Salidity, the parking.Without hesitation, I lifted it, ran below, and I found myself in the middle of the crowd.

Among so much confusion nobody repaired in me.For a few moments I ran uselessly from here, with the rain whipping my face.Wherever Miraba passed by images of my own panic.Lagente paraded blindly around me: police, firefighters, concascos types, an old man holding his elbow broken and a woman with his nose to whom a upset agent scared away the streets of the streets and nine.

I had never seen so many firefighters together: Brigade 18, fight 44, New York staircase, one, truck 4 rescue: the proud center.Opening the sea of parked vehicles and official black gycars, I saw an ambulance of Hatzolah, with letters hebrews in the rear and a small hospitable room that was seen through the open doors.The nurses sought a woman, trying to be thrown when she struggled.A wrinkled hand with red nails scratched the air.

I knocked on the door hitting her with my fist.

"They have to go back in there," I shouted, ".There are still people ...

"There are another bomb," one shouted, without looking at me..We had to evacuate.

Before I had time to assimilate it, a huge policeman fell like a thunder;A bulldog's face, with their arms swollen like a weightlifter.He took me abruptly for the arrest and began to host me pushing to the other side of Lacalle.

"What the pussy are you doing here?""She bied, drowning my protests while I was trying to get out.

"Origa ..." A woman with a bloody face approached and tried to attract her attention. ".Hey, I think I have a broken hand ...

"Hold on the building!"He shouted the policeman by moving his arm speed, and, heading to me, he added, "Go!"

-But…

With both hands I pushed me so strong that I staggered and I almost fell.

—¡APÁRTENSE DEL EDYoFYoCYoO! —gritó, arrojando los brazos en alto con una sacudida del chubasquero—. ¡AHORA MYoSMO!

I didn't even look at me;The little eyes of her were nailed Enalgo that happened on my head, uphill, and Sucara's expression terrified me.

With hurry I dodged the multitude of employees of the services of emergency until reaching the sidewalk in front, just above the seventy -nine lacalle, always attentive in case I saw my mother, but no lavi. Había un sinfín de ambulancias y otros vehículos sanitarios deurgencias del Beth Yosrael, el Lenox Hill, el Presbiteriano de NuevaYork, el SME Paramédico del Cabrini.In the tiny garden fenced with a mansion of Fifth Avenue, behind a hedge of Ornamental Tejo, lay on his back a bloody man with an executive suit.Unacinta yellow extended from one side to another stirred and restalized Alviento, but the soaked police, firefighters and other types with a helmet laleiled and passed below as if they were not there.

All eyes headed towards the center of the city, and then I found out the reason.On eighty -four street (too much to see something), the hacmat units were arranged for a precise moment to deactivate a pump that had not triggered a water cannon.Resolved to talk to someone to stop what had happened, I tried.

I grabbed a firefighter, a young -looking young man who chewed gum from the gabardine.

"There are still people in there!""I shouted.".

-Yes Yes, lo sabemos —dijo a voces el bombero, sin mirarme—.Peronos have given orders to leave.They say that in five minutes we will have to enter again.

I felt a quick push on my back.

"Moves, move!"—Oí scream at.A rough voice, with a strong accent.

"Let me get your hands on!"

"Come on, circulate!"

Someone else pushed me from behind.Firefighters, leaning back on the stairs of the trucks, looked up at the temple of Dendur;The police waited tense, shoulder shoulder, impassive in the rain.When spending staggering in front of them, carried by the current, I saw glassy eyes, heads nodding and feet march unconsciously.

When I heard the bomb's click when it was deactivated, followed delronc.The police - traffic guards - stirred their arms like the blades of a mill to go back the torrent of stunned people.

"Come on, circulate, circulate."They made her way between the crowd, patting.".All east.To the East.

A policeman - a guy with a knob and a ring slope, as a professional unluchader.

-Care!He shouted the delivery man, with a very acute and disgraceable voice;But the policeman pushed him again, this time with so much that he knocked him on his back on the gutter.

"Are you deaf or what, colleague?"-scream-.Circulates.

-Do not touch me!

"What do you think if I break your face?"

Between fifth and Madison was a cricket cage.Dehelicopter rotors roaring above our heads;excitement through a megaphone.Although they had closed the street seventy -nine altraffick.Some ran from Fifth Avenue;Others were shed by force to the museum;Many sustained high the mobile trying to take pictures;Others remained motionless with the open mouth while the crowd passed around them, looking at the black smoke in the rainy skies of the fifth Avenid as if the Martians were landing.

Mermaids;White smoke rising from subway ventilation grilles.A vagabund wrapped in a filthy blanket wandered with air and confusing.I looked desperately to my mother among the crowd, hoping to see her, and for a while I tried to go against the countercurrent deloreter channel by the police (of tiptoe, stretching the neck to see), until I understood that it was useless to go back and try to find it under that torrential rainAnd between that crowd.I will see her, I thought.We were supposed to meet at home;That was the agreement in case of emergency;She must have understood that it would see us from looking for me in the midst of such agglomeration of people.Even so, I took a small and irrational chasco, and while I was going home (with a headache so frightening that I saw practically double) I will not seek to look for it, scrutinizing the anonymous and worried faces that they wore with the hope of seeing her.My mother had left the building; that was the important.It was at several rooms away from the explosion.None of the bodies I had seen inside was her.However, no matter how much we would have agreed to the desert, or for a lot.