As I think back on my childhood, many images come to me. And as I shift through them, there is one that stands out. It was a rainy winter night at midnight. I was about three years old and I was standing in front of our house waiting for my father. It was very cold and dark, except for the abrupt flashes of lightning which illuminated the slick, cobbled street, tracing silvery patterns over the black stones. The driving rain had long since soaked my shoes, seeping in through numerous holes. The thunder was deafening, rolling and crashing with frightening intensity, but I wasn't afraid. My attention was fixed on my father's tall and thin silhouette staggering towards me.

As he came closer, I bolted into the house to warn my mother of his approach, and she rose hurriedly from her bed. Not waiting for her to follow, I remember dashing back out into the storm just in time to see him fall full length upon the pavement. With my heart in my throat, I ran to help him and as he raised himself up and I saw that his face had been torn and was bleeding. It upset me to see him in pain and I struggled to help him stand, but I was so small I could not do it. Our progress as we made our way back to the house was so slow that we were both soaked to the bone.

His dark, wavy hair hung over his bronzed forehead and his face was like something out of a garish nightmare. A wine-stained film blurred the lines of his sensual mouth. The nostrils of his proud, aquiline nose flared with fury. All of these details filled me with a trembling expectancy not unmixed with fear. When my father was drunk it was like watching a good suspense film; one never knew what might happen next. Experience had taught us that what usually happened was unpleasant at best, and so for a few moments I merely waited to see if anything was about to occur. When nothing did, I took him by the hand again and led him forward into our one small room.

My mother had lit her candle in its makeshift holder and by its flickering light our shadows were thrown against the wall, enlarged and eerie. My father's dominated, huge and distorted beside my tiny one, while my mother's, cast from her seat on the edge of the bed, resembled a statue of a woman praying before an altar.

We were silent, fearful of saying something which might provoke the violence we knew was only too easy to trigger. My little sister, Alicia, was asleep in her cradle on the far side of the room, and as my father's gaze swept over us, as if seeking some excuse for anger, it lit upon her and he suddenly stumbled in that direction. My mother jumped up and I threw myself after him, but a moment too late; before we could intervene, he had lashed out with his foot and sent the cradle flying. The baby was thrown violently to the ground and I was knocked to my knees as he turned his wrath on the empty crib, banging it against me. My mother instantly swooped down on the baby and snatched her up, retreating to the far side of the room where she then stood, sheltering it in her arms. Alicia had begun to cry in terror for such treatment was not uncommon. When my father was drunk he would oftentimes shout abuse at my mother, accusing her of adultery on the grounds that Alicia was too fair-skinned to be any daughter of his. Alicia was no fairer complected than my mother.

My mother softly stroked Alicia while eyeing her husband warily, but the outburst seemed to have calmed and even exhausted him, for he swayed on his feet and made no protest when I guided him to the bed. My mother righted the cradle and lay the baby down again, and after much coaxing and cajoling we finally managed to convince my father to do the same. Even though he was so far gone that the slightest push would have knocked him over, we held him in too much dread to use such direct methods. We also knew that we could not count on his extreme drunkenness preventing him from suddenly getting up again, or renewing his violence.

It was just as we had feared. Only seconds after we had disposed ourselves to sleep and the candle was extinguished, there came the sounds of a struggle. As I listened anxiously I could hear labored breathing and then a pitiful entreaty. My fear for my mother was all the more suffocating for my inability to see her in the darkness or hear her clearly enough to be able to tell if she was all right.

Just as I was about to brave my father's fury and creep over to their bed, my mother suddenly jumped up sobbing and ran for the door, away from his restraining hands. No sooner had she grasped the knob and yanked it open, though, than my father launched himself at her back. There was a deafening burst of thunder at that precise moment, and as the room was lit up I saw to my horror that he held a knife in his hand. He was backing my mother against the wall and pressing the blade against her chest, swearing furiously. In a panic, I threw myself against his thighs and tried to shove him away, but rage had strengthened his balance and I could not move him an inch. Darkness had returned but the light from outside was enough to outline their figures, the one so murderously intent, the other so shrinkingly still.

I stared in blank horror at the scene before me. There was death in the room at that moment; this was beyond a mere drunken tantrum. If I left them to seek help he could kill her before I returned, but if I stayed I would be equally powerless. I could not waste any time. Turning my back on my mother, I ran to the still open door and as I threw myself for the second time into the storm that night, I had an instant's precocious awareness that my decision would perhaps prove to be the most important of my life, and then all conscious thought was routed by simple, overwhelming fear.

I know now that I ran to a neighbor's house and roused someone by banging on the door and screaming in an agony lest I be too late. I remember, too, that the tall man who rushed after me wore nothing but his underwear as we plunged through the rain underfoot. It was an incongruous detail that impressed itself vividly upon me. But we were in time. When we burst into the room, my father retained enough sense to spring back in the face of a grown witness, and we had soon talked him into relinquishing his knife. My mother was badly shaken but unharmed except for a tiny prick where the knife point had pierced her breast, and soon we were trying again to get some sleep in the few hours left before dawn.

In some ways the mind is wiser than the memory, for in refusing to yield up a clearer picture of that wild errand, I am sure I have been spared a searingly painful recollection. Even without a complete image of the night's horror I cannot stand to think of it, and the sight of a drunken man fills me with dread to this day.

The following morning my mother and I rose early as always, although it was still dark and quiet. Now the rain had stopped. The atmosphere was oppressive with unhappiness as my mother started a fire with the dry wood and branches we had gathered the day before. Even the feeble light at the break of dawn was sad and apathetic. The hiss of the sparking kindling,

superimposed over the monotonous dripping from the eaves, was scarcely less depressing.

Our house sat at an intersection, and from that day I have always thought of it as "The Corner of Sadness." The name was certainly appropriate for our family and probably for most of our neighbors, as well. The dirt roads with their patches of stone paving seemed to lead nowhere, and on a morning such as this the very mud of them looked bleak and inescapable. Our view was equally disheartening; beyond the track of the sidewalk lay a vacant lot, a wide open space so devoid of life one could almost suppose it to be dying of its own loneliness.

Turning away from the door I glanced at my mother, busy at the brazier. I knew intuitively that hers was the silence of inner pain, and of weariness at a too often repeated cruelty. She had not even the energy to protest anymore, and indeed I am sure she knew that it would have been futile anyway.

She handed me a mug of mate, saying, "Here, little one--," and as I sipped the boiling hot herb tea I stared over the rim at the bruises and swellings left by my father's hands the night before. What I would have given to be able to erase those disfigurements from her lovely face! For she was a lovely woman. Her eyes were huge and expressive, framed with thick, black lashes; her nose was slender, her lips sensitively etched. The discolorations were an outrage, livid against the pallor of her fine skin, so beautifully set off by her straight, dark hair.

Even though I could empathize with her in her distress, still I must admit that similarly everything about her inspired an unhappy despondency in me. We sat sipping at our mate until it was time for her to go to work, and I could think of nothing to say which would ease the heaviness of our spirits. My mother hired out as a domestic servant, that unenviable career being the legacy of her lifelong poverty. I watched her figure in the distance as she rapidly walked to work. The sadness of the poor only grows into more despair.

As I watched her disappear around a bend, noises from within the house alerted me that my father was getting up. It was apparent that he was sober and had no recollection of the previous night. Deeming this amnesia more a blessing than otherwise, I said nothing as he drank several mates and then told me he too was off to work. He was a longshoreman by trade but as he never sought work when he was out of it, and rarely went when he was in it, he was to all intents and purposes permanently unemployed. I had heard it said that he was lazy, and indeed when he had finished his breakfast I watched him amble no farther than the house next door.

I cannot remember how many times I watched him do this, it happened so frequently. He would enter the house and when the door closed behind him, it would be hours before I saw him again. Eventually it seemed to me that he only went there when my mother was away from home, and this filled me with anxious curiosity. After a time this curiosity changed to a suspicion, but there it was; I was only trying to fool myself when I asked, "But why does he go there?" I could not figure out then that infidelity was taking place behind that door. But I never spoke of it to my mother.

On that particular day I walked barefoot up the muddy sidewalk to the extreme end, beyond the houses on our row, and hid there waiting for him to leave. Presently, I saw him emerge and walk away with a smooth, energetic stride, his head held high. The athletic trimness of his broad shoulders and slim waist had a great magnetism which did not leave me untouched. What mixed emotions he aroused in me! Hate, love, fear, confusion . . . I felt them all, and all at once. Truly, it was no harder to love him than to hate him, for when he was sober he had great charm. At those times it was easy to see what my mother had loved in him before his character was irretrievably drowned in alcohol.

When he stayed home with us there was little he did not do; he cooked and ironed and minded my sister and me. He swept our room and the kitchen, even the patio. The latter I recall well. As all of our floors were earthen it was necessary to sprinkle them with water before sweeping to lay the dust. For this purpose he used the kettle we boiled the mate water in, and as he splashed the water about it ran in little rivulets over the ground, unabsorbed by the hard earth. As children in other lands might trace out patterns in the cracks on their plaster walls, just so did we delight in creating pictures from the water as it trickled over the dirt. Then as the breezes swept over the floor the images would fade away, but they left behind them a sweet, rich scent of damp earth.

Back then it never occurred to me to puzzle out why it was that smell produced in me a sensation of freedom and peace. Now, however, I realize it was not simply the tranquillity of his domestic moments that I treasured, but the calm which accompanied only his brief +spells of sobriety. Even when he was drunk, he never shouted or laid a hand on me.

I was recalled from these somewhat melancholy thoughts by the sound of Alicia crying in her cradle, and I turned back into the house. There was no milk to still her hunger, but then there almost never was. I filled her bottle with mate, instead. Sighing a little, I went about my task of playing surrogate mother.

My mother's homecoming was always eagerly awaited because she used to bring home leftovers from her employer's meals. When there were no scraps she would steal as much as she dared from every dish which she prepared or served. In many ways my mother had great strength of character. It might seem the obvious or "easy" thing to do, to steal, but it was not because it wounded her pride. She was not a willing thief; she took what she could for her children and never complained.

Sometimes she would tell us stories about the families she worked for, and from these, pictures of them grew in my mind. Some were tyrannical and despotic towards their servants, but others were kind and well-intentioned.

Our poverty was partially alleviated by my mother. My father always made her hand over her salary, though; he claimed it as his right and she almost never argued with him because he could be very cunning in the pressures he brought to bear on her when she did. For example, with his smooth tongue it took no particular effort for him to take advances on her wages from her employers, about which he would naturally say nothing to her. Rather than face the shock of receiving no money at all for her labor--even money she didn't get to spend--she would hand over her earnings with unhappy resignation.

I always had the impression that my mother was well-liked by our neighbors, but now I wonder if perhaps it wasn't pity. She was a sad example of the degradation and inhumanity of extreme poverty. She also existed in a man's world, in which the laws reflected only too clearly the incredible degree of the Latin preoccupation with "machismo." Most of these laws were little more than civilian catch-22's. For a law requiring that "married women must share the same place of residence as their husbands, unless to do so places them in danger of bodily harm," would be a related, counter law stating, "a married woman who voluntarily departs from her husband's place of residence shall be considered to have abandoned her family, and so will forfeit all right to her status as guardian of her children." Obviously, these laws left something to be desired from someone in a position like that of my mother. On the very few occasions on which her husband's brutality drove her to protest to the authorities, she was turned away more disheartened than ever, after having a few such rulings quoted to her. Fortunately for us all, her submissiveness eventually proved to have its limits, though!

My father was always surrounded by friends, mostly drunks and wanderers picked up in the course of his daily rounds of the local bars and gambling spots. He would bring them home with him and more often than not, ply them with food and drink. My mother would quarrel with him over his periodic binges, pointing out that he and his friends were drinking away his children's very subsistence, but she only learned at her expense that it is useless to argue with a man when he's drunk.

It was with one of these "friends of the family" that I had my first encounter with man's most primitive instincts. One day during the siesta hour, one of my father's guests stretched out on the floor in the kitchen and invited me to lie beside him. In all good faith I took him up on his offer and fell asleep next to him. When I awoke, I felt something warm between my legs. I jumped scare and curious. Then I looked, and for the first time in my life I saw a penis. But it was years before I could definitely identify the "something" of that afternoon with a penis. Still a feeling of intense shame took hold of me. I felt sinful.

On another afternoon at the Corner of Sadness, we chanced to win a sort of lottery given by Peron and Evita, consisting of food and goods for the poor. My father chose to take it as an insult to his political ideas. So strongly was he convinced that to accept our winnings would jeopardize our future well-being that he piled up our entire lot on the patio--mattresses, bed frames, clothing, toys, packages of food--all of this he dumped in a heap and set on fire. How clearly the smell of that smoke comes back to me! While my mother, the neighbors and all of us looked on in awed silence. The tongues of flame leapt and flickered in the air, and the heap gradually charred to ash.

Not long afterwards came another such bittersweet afternoon. My mother, just home from work on a payday, said, "Little one, let's go buy you some shoes!" It was already late in the day but the streets were still bathed in sunshine and the air and sidewalks were warm with it. My mother walked along with her usual grace, but I hopped and pranced all around her, unable to contain my delight.

The return trip down the street was even happier still. Bubbling over with joy, I went to show off my beautiful new patent shoes to my father. In response to my enthusiasm, he merely inclined his head, and instantly I knew there was trouble ahead. Later I heard my mother arguing with him. Shortly afterwards she came out of the house to where I was playing with tears streaming down her face, and said,

"Let's go, my dear. We have to return the shoes because your father wants the money." All of the joy of the afternoon was extinguished like a guttered candle. We walked with our heads down, as vowing to martyrdom.

Poverty had yet to acquire a death grip on us. We were thrown out of our house for not paying rent. My mother was expecting her third child. We moved in with my paternal grandmother who despite her age was agile, tall and strongly built. Also she had all the strength of character my father lacked. She was very kind. She had borne eight children, including my father (who was the only one who drank), and now had a swarm of grandchildren as well. Her face looked like a wrinkled little girl, and she emanated a great sense of fortitude. Nothing could have exceeded the affection my mother and I felt for her. I was one child among many, but I always felt that she favored me.

Her house consisted of a large room which always smelled bracingly clean. In front of the house was a big well full of rainwater. Balancing on the edge of it, I used to lean and feel the cool freshness of the water and stare at my reflection. To the left of the well was a hen house, which was my grandmother's only means of support. Behind it was the latrine, with walls made of clay and grass and a burlap sack serving as a door.

Every morning my grandmother would come outside carrying a big iron brazier and sit down on the patio. I would take a seat next to her and sipped mate, te. Then she would cook me a boiling egg over the glowing coals while she taught me embroidery and knitting. My recollections of the time with my grandmother are of peaceful tranquillity. Her loving spirit has filled me for life. Every week we used to walked far away to take the left over eggs from that week to a widow with many children. She did not allowed my father to live with us, but I was always waiting for his next show.

Finally, it was dawn and I had been soundly sleeping when I was jolted awake by the most terrifying of noises. There was a high-pitched screaming sound, punctuated by overwhelmingly loud crashes and bangs on the door. This grew steadily more furious as I jumped out of bed in a panic. When I ran forward I could see my mother going to investigate. Her eyes wide with apprehension, and as she did the great double doors of the house were suddenly flung open. A fraction of a second seemed to pass and then I understood that great pounding: there loomed before us the towering figure of a huge black stallion with my father precariously maintaining his balance on its bare back. To my horror I saw that he was trying to force the maddened animal through the small doorway. It was the sound of its hooves against the iron banding on the doors which we had heard, and its high whinnying screams. The horse was naturally rearing and plunging with fright as my father goaded it cruelly with his heels. At over sixteen hands, it could no more fit through the entrance than I could come and go through the keyhole.

After a few minutes of staring petrified at this horrifying sight, my mother, sister and I all began to shriek until our voices rose to form a weirdly hideous cacophony of our own to blend with the stallion's screams, and the walls seemed to reverberate with sound. I was convinced that the house was going to come crashing down around us and we would all be trampled to death, because the noise just went on and on and yet my father only redoubled his mad efforts. Fortunately, my grandmother came to the scene and her presence alone prevented a much worse catastrophe.

Unlike us she had the good sense to take a stern authoritative tone and to shout down her son instead of retreating or shaking with abject terror before him. , but I know it was some time before he seemed to come to his senses and realize the impossibility of continuing. To this day it amazes me that he was able to keep his seat as long as he did, for he was as drunk as I had ever seen him, yet he rode away semi-erect in the end.

As he and the horse faded into the darkness, I literally collapsed in a heap on the floor, a relief so tremendous having overwhelmed me that I simply could not stand up anymore. My mother, when she had calmed down herself, had to carry me back to my bed, but I found myself straining to hear the sound of returning hoof beats and remained wide awake. We were to find in the days that followed that the terror I had experienced had left a more serious wound than was immediately apparent. Nightly from then on into the years of early adulthood, I suffered fearsome nightmares in which gigantic human and animal figures burst into my room and crushed me as I slept.

A much more cheerful memory is of the day I was playing in the street in front of our house when a truck with a load of piglets went by. The jolting over the unpaved road had apparently loosened the latch of the rear door for suddenly it flew open, and all the pigs went flying through the air. What a sight! As the driver trod frantically on the brake, I and all the neighbors went running wildly after the scattering brood, most of us laughing hysterically. Despite our definite amusement at the poor man's predicament, we managed to recapture all of his animals, and in his gratitude he presented me (perhaps because I was the youngest) with a tiny piglet no bigger than a turtle dove. When I took it home, clasping it proudly against my chest, my grandmother made a little corral for it, in which I took great delight in watching it grow.

Unfortunately, no one thought to correct my certainty that the ever bigger pig was mine and mine alone, and that no one would dare to lay a hand on it without my permission. For although I was certainly dependent upon the household for his scraps, I was the one who tended him and fed him and (it must be admitted) sometimes poked him with a stick to make him run around for my entertainment. However, the inevitable naturally happened. One day my father ordained that it was time to put an end to my friend's existence. Well, that was terrible, of course, but when he went on to make plans for eating it as well, I thought I would never recover from my horror. And I decided right then and there that I would never ever forgive that heartless group of people who sat around later that day unconcernedly eating my little pig while I sobbed bitterly in the yard.

As a matter of fact, the "pig episode" is the last memory I have of my grandmother. I cannot remember anything else that occurred during our stay with her and the next I was to hear of her was the news of her death at the age of eighty-five.

Eventually, my father's lack of work obliged us to travel into the country during the corn harvesting season, to see if we could pick up some temporary positions there. As I recall, it was bitterly cold and we were sleeping out of doors in tents. My brother had been born by then and even his tiny hands contributed to our effort, as the whole family worked harvesting. Now, more than ever, I felt a deep sense of obligation to help my mother because I was her eldest child, and I tried very hard to keep my end up in everything we did. My hands were soon rubbed raw from husking ear after ear of hard corn, but I refused to lose heart.

The cold was not what my mother and I came to hate the most about that time, though; that distinction would have to go to the snakes. Snakes abounded in the region and were in fact so numerous that we used to find them in the tents. Understandably, we were all extremely reluctant to crawl into bed each night, for even if the blankets proved to be snake-free, there was no guarantee that they would remain so throughout the night. My greatest fear during those weeks rapidly became that of waking up in the morning to find some enterprising specimen sharing my bed.

Despite these qualms, I am still proud of my part during that season because it was the first time I experienced the mixed pleasures and responsibilities of working in a group. I enjoyed the sense of autonomy which came from knowing I was contributing daily to our mutual support and was a necessary part of our livelihood. In fact, that sense of pride led to my first objective view of our lives as a whole. As I weighed out kernels with the dry measure, I felt I was beginning to understand and accept that this life of backbreaking struggle (commencing for so many like myself virtually from birth) was simply the inescapable lot of the poor laborer--a fact of life. I was still a child, but I was a child of the poor and I was learning resignation.

When the harvest was over my father went on to find work stoking the furnaces in a coal refinery. I would bring him his lunch every day at break time, and it saddened me to see him sweating from the heat of his exertions before his oven. It was good to see him working, but it was hard to be thankful for the kind of work which he inevitably ended up doing.

My growing resignation was tinged with another, more resilient emotion, though, which was to show through in my dreams. The snakes were numerous here, too, and as with anything that troubled or affected me deeply, I soon began to dream about them. But instead of being devoured by my phantom vipers, I began instead to dream that I turned and hacked them to pieces with a weapon which I suddenly found in my hand.

My father was tired of his job. I could see for myself that although he had been working very hard, nothing ever seemed to pull us off our treadmill. So back we all traveled to our old hometown, where he promptly broke all his promises. But this time he had gone too far.

One day my mother came to me, and drawing me off to one side, said in a low voice: "Daughter, between us we have managed to save some money, and now I think it's time we used it to get away from here." I knew of her tiny stash because I was its keeper. She had hidden her money in a little bag pinned inside the waistband of my panties. Between us we had chosen this hiding place figuring that it might well be the only place my father would never think to search.

Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me that this was the use she had planned for her hoard, although she had asked me not to tell my brother and sister about it, and I knew Alicia, especially, loved my father to the point of carrying tales about us to him. Now that she told me her plans, the months of scrimping and saving pennies and of furtive trips to the bathroom to secret them began to make sense. And once she had made up her mind she was surprisingly quick about arranging for our departure, and indeed so efficient that my father had no inkling of the surprise in store for him.

Of our actual escape I remember very little, save that it was made on an ancient bus incredibly full of people with suitcases, bags, boxes and the ubiquitous heaps of untidy packages tied up with string--the most common of luggage among the poor.

The trip was a long one and I was soon utterly worn out by it. Every so often I would crane my neck around to peer out the window behind us, but all there was to see were the clouds of dust raised by our passing. I felt no fear or regret at abandoning my father. He had caused me far too much pain for any separation from him to upset me. On the contrary, I felt only a tranquil security at being with my mother, especially the new, strong person she seemed now. I was also very curious about the big city we were traveling to, for I was certain that once we reached it my father would never find us and an exciting new life would be ours for the making. Unfortunately, in my childish naivete, I had slightly underestimated my father's sagacity.

However, my disillusionment was still in the future when we finally arrived at my uncle's house. He was the kindest of men, big-hearted and generous in the extreme when you consider that he barely made enough to support his own family without taking in his brother's wife and children as well. He managed to secure a job for my mother in a hotel a few blocks away from the house, in the central district.

How happy I was there! I fell into my new life as if born to it. My brother and sister and I were usually left to our own devices during the day, but I, at least, never felt alone. In front of the house and the hotel where my mother worked ran the river which divided the city in half. I usually passed my time by it, squatting on the bank herding minnows with a tin can, or the kitchen colander. The water was clean, calm and limpid. I can still picture the river as it looked from my vantage point, shining with hundreds of little flat stones of white, yellow and brown. As I liked to watch my feet beneath the ripples, sometimes I would paddle by the bank, holding my skirt up with one hand (although for all my efforts to hold it high, the hem always became soaked!).

I felt utterly free during those days. My spirit had calmed to a still water of peace and my head was filling with gloriously ambitious dreams for the first time in my life. Finally it seemed I had become a dream myself, or part of one. I imagined that my ardency was going to empower me to be able to win all of the best for us, my family. As I came into contact with a much greater variety of people now, from different strata of life, my games of pretending began to alter subtly so that they, too, reflected my newfound awareness. While other children played house, for example, I played not only at being a great Dama, or Lady, but one who spoke in a foreign tongue. I had observed that the mastery of other languages was invariably linked to a degree of comfort and leisure utterly beyond us, but not past dreaming about.

This happiness of mine was to prove a fleeting, ephemeral thing, for my father wasted no time in tracking us down. Once he had found us he was furious, so that our renewed cohabitation was much more unpleasant--if such a thing were possible--than ever before. He berated my mother constantly, and his brother as well for having sheltered us. Finally it reached the point where his ire was uncontainable and he decided abruptly that we were to remove from his brother's house, since he now regarded his sibling as his "enemy."

And so it was that on a rainy day he herded us off to live in a miserable little hovel beneath one of the bridges over the river. This abrupt return to our old, unhappy way of life came as a terrible shock to me after the brief but intense happiness of the preceding weeks. My newly developed sense of hope--of belief in an unpredictability of life which allowed the possibility that things could change for the better and not just the worse--collapsed. Hope, I decided, was simply too fragile an emotion to indulge; it didn't stand up under the weight of poverty's reality.

My mother was not to be beaten so easily, though. She had taken the first step towards asserting her independence, laws or no laws, when she had left him before. It hadn't worked but she was realistic enough to know why; our flight had been too easy to trace. A second attempt was now inevitable, and a saner man than my father would undoubtedly have realized it--even tried to prevent it.

My uncle, horrified by the turn of events since his brother's arrival in the city, gave my mother plenty of surreptitious support. Eventually he supplied her with the address of a new situation and some money with which to make the trip. My mother rented a hackney and on the appointed day we children tried simultaneously to climb into it in a great tangle of thrashing arms and legs. We were afraid our father would come along before we could get away. In fact, I was so afraid of seeing his form approaching that I didn't even dare to raise my head and look around, taking advantage of the convertible roof.

This journey, like the first, seemed interminable but finally we arrived at an unwelcoming house on the other side of town. There we lived for some days. My mother was employed but the pay was so meager it barely covered our meals. Moreover, we were all conscious of the fact that for as long as we were there we were living in a potential trap. We could not forget that my father was in the same city and might stumble across us at any moment. I was so disquieted by this reflection that I was forever peering out of the windows to see who was coming down the street.

Finally, one day the suspense came to an end. I heard hammering on the door downstairs, and on seeing my

father I became so terrified of his wrath that I stiffened up like a board and lost my voice from fright.

Following his arrival we were no longer allowed to sleep inside the house but instead lived under a sort of porch arrangement on the ground floor. The roof was zinc and had numerous tiny holes in it through which water dripped every time it rained, soaking our beds below.

I am sure that my mother must have been feeling increasingly desperate about the fact that nothing she tried seemed to work. Certainly her striking good looks were beginning to appear haggard, and her expression was more anxious than it used to be. Yet she still fought against the odds until finally she got herself another job where the employer would accept her with two of her children. No one would take her with all three, and indeed that had always been the major stumbling block which thwarted her plans. For some reason three children seemed excessive, whereas two were acceptable. She had managed in this instance to find a way around the problem by convincing the landlord at our current position to keep my sister until we could come back for her.

The logic behind her decision to leave Alicia was that as the elder, I would be of the most practical use to her when it came to helping with her job, and my brother Jose was still too young to be left alone. No matter how impartial this reasoning may have been, it did not prevent my mother from finding herself unable to face her younger daughter with her decision. And so the separation, when it came, was perhaps more brutal than it need have been. We called a taxi and sent Alicia out to buy something. To this day, I find it impossible to say if the ruse was to prevent her from having to watch us go, or ourselves from having to see her left behind. It was probably the latter and it was not for many years until I realized that a great degree of the sorrow I felt afterwards was actually guilt, even though the situation had been none of my making. This guilt was to be greatly exacerbated when, within two months of our enforced separation, a friend came to tell my mother that my father had taken Alicia off with him to a horrible slum where she was living in the worst possible conditions. That same day my mother redoubled her efforts at finding a job which would take us all.

For once we were in luck. We were soon able to rescue my sister and this time we hid so successfully from my father that we left no trail for him to follow. Indeed, we then heard nothing of him for many years to come.