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By Root 908 0

before she went to sleep. Songs were her prayers. They helped her endure the sad life of a daughter without a father and with a grieving mother. Nobody helped her. She made herself on her own, on her own she asked for a job at a club in Rosales, was taken on, liked it, then went to a better neighborhood and began to believe everything she was singing. The bolero isn’t good to women. It calls the female a “hypocrite, simply a hypocrite,” and adds: “perverse one, you deceived me.” Elvira Morales, to give conviction to her songs, took on the guilt in the lyrics, wondered if her fatal sap really poisoned men and if her sex was the ivy of evil. She took the lyrics of boleros very seriously. Which was why she inspired enthusiasm, convinced her audience, and provoked applause night after night in the white spotlights that fortunately obscured the patrons’ faces. The public was the dark side of the moon, and Elvira Morales could give herself blindly to the passions she sang about, convinced they were true and that, since in song she was an “adventuress on earth,” she would not be one in real life. On the contrary, she let it be known that the price of her love was high, very high, and whoever wanted the honey of her mouth would pay for the sin in diamonds. Elvira Morales could sing melodically about the abjectness of her fate, but offstage she jealously preserved the “springtime of her worth” (it rhymed with “adventuress on earth”). After the show, she never mixed with the audience. She would return to her dressing room, change, and go home, where her unfortunate mother was waiting for her. The patrons’ invitations—a drink, a dance, a little love—were turned down, the flowers tossed into the trash, the small gifts returned. And the fact is that Elvira Morales, in every sense, took what she sang seriously. She knew through the bolero the dangers of life: lies, weariness, misery. But the lyrics authorized her to believe, to really believe, that “true affection, with no lies, no wickedness,” can be found when “love is sincere.”

THE DAUGHTER. Alma Pagán made an effort to find a place in the world. Let no one say she did not try. At eighteen, she realized she could not have a career. There was no time and no money. Secondary school was the most she could hope for, especially if the family’s resources (so limited) would go to help her brother, Abel, at the university. Alma was a very attractive girl. Tall, slim, with long legs and a narrow waist, black hair in a helmet cut, a bust ample but not exaggerated, a matte complexion and veiled eyes, a partially open mouth, and a small, nervous nose, Alma seemed made to order for the recent occupation of aide at official ceremonies. Alma dressed just like the other three or six or twelve girls selected for business shows, international conferences, official ceremonies, in a white blouse and navy blue jacket and skirt, dark stockings, and high heels; her function was to stand quietly behind the speaker, refill glasses of water for panels, and never smile, much less disapprove of anything. Expel her emotions and be the perfect mannequin. One day she joined five colleagues at a charity event, and she saw herself as identical to them, all of them exactly the same, all differences erased. They were clones of one another. They had no other destiny but to be identical among themselves without ever being identical to themselves, to resemble one another in immobility and then disappear, retired because of their age, their weight, or a run in a black stocking. This idea horrified Alma Pagán. She quit, and since she was young and pretty, she found a job as a flight attendant on an airline that served the interior of the country. She didn’t want to be far from her family and therefore didn’t look for work on international flights. Perhaps she guessed her own destiny. That happens. And it also happens that on night flights the male passengers, as soon as the lights were lowered, took advantage of the situation and caressed her legs as she passed, or stared hungrily at her neckline, or simply pinched a