fina lifted Lidia by the armpits and carried her as they tiptoed
two or three times around the table. Then all three of them
collapsed as if they had springs on their knees that had con-
tracted at the same time. Their long dresses puffed up, giving
them the appearance of huge balls.
As soon as they were on the floor they became even more
quiet. There was no other sound except the soft swishing of
their dresses as they rolled and crawled. It was as if I were
watching a three-dimensional movie with the sound turned off.
La Gorda, who had been quietly sitting next to me watch-
ing them, suddenly stood up and with the agility of an acrobat
ran toward the door of their room at the corner of the dining
area. Before she reached the door she tumbled on her right
side and shoulder just enough to turn over once, then stood
up, pulled by the momentum of her rolling, and flung open
the door. She performed all her movements with absolute
quietness.
The three girls rolled and crawled into the room like giant
pill bugs. La Gorda signaled me to come over to where she
was; we entered the room and she had me sit on the floor with
my back against the frame of the door. She sat to my right
with her back also against the frame. She made me interlock
my fingers and then placed my hands over my belly button.
I was at first forced to divide my attention between la
Gorda, the little sisters and the room. But once la Gorda had
arranged my sitting position, my attention was taken up by
the room. The three girls were lying in the middle of a large,
white, square room with a brick floor. There were four gaso-
line lanterns, one on each wall, placed on built-in supporting
ledges approximately six feet above the ground. The room
had no ceiling. The supporting beams of the roof had been
darkened and that gave the effect of an enormous room with
no top. The two doors were placed on the very corners oppo-
site each other. As I looked at the closed door across from
where I was, I noticed that the walls of the room were ori-
ented to follow the cardinal points. The door where we were
was at the northwest corner.
Rosa, Lidia and Josefina rolled counterclockwise around
the room several times. I strained to hear the swish of their
dresses but the silence was absolute. I could only hear la Gorda
breathing. The little sisters finally stopped and sat down with
their backs against the wall, each under a lantern. Lidia sat at
the east wall, Rosa, at the north and Josefina, at the west.
La Gorda stood up, closed the door behind us and secured
it with an iron bar. She made me slide over a few inches, with-
out changing my position, until I was sitting with my back
against the door. Then she silently rolled the length of the
room and sat down underneath the lantern on the south wall;
her getting into that sitting position seemed to be the cue.
Lidia stood up and began to walk on the tips of her toes
along the edges of the room, close to the walls. It was not a
walk proper but rather a soundless sliding. As she increased
her speed she began to move as if she were gliding, stepping
on the angle between the floor and the walls. She would jump
over Rosa, Josefina, la Gorda and myself every time she got
to where we were sitting. I felt her long dress brushing me
every time she went by. The faster she ran, the higher she
got on the wall. A moment came when Lidia was actually
running silently around the four walls of the room seven or
eight feet above the floor. The sight of her, running perpen-
dicular to the walls, was so unearthly that it bordered on the
grotesque. Her long gown made the sight even more eerie.
Gravity did not seem to have any effect on Lidia, but it did
on her long skirt; it dragged downward. I felt it every time
she passed over my head, sweeping my face like a hanging
drape.
She had captured my attentiveness at a level I could not
imagine. The strain of giving her my undivided attention was
so great that I began to get stomach convulsions; I felt her
running with my stomach. My eyes were getting out of focus.
With the last bit of my remaining concentration, I saw Lidia
walk down on the east wall diagonally and come to a halt in
the middle of the room.
She was panting, out of breath, and drenched in perspira-
tion like la Gorda had been after her flying display. She could
hardly keep her balance. After a moment she walked to her
place at the east wall and collapsed on the floor like a wet rag.
I thought she had fainted, but then I noticed that she was de-
liberately breathing through her mouth.
After some minutes of stillness, long enough for Lidia to
recover her strength and sit up straight, Rosa stood up and
ran without making a sound to the center of the room, turned
on her heels and ran back to where she had been sitting. Her
running allowed her to gain the necessary momentum to make
an outlandish jump. She leaped up in the air, like a basketball
player, along the vertical span of the wall, and her hands went
beyond the height of the wall, which was perhaps ten feet.
I saw her body actually hitting the wall, although there was
no corresponding crashing sound. I expected her to rebound
to the floor with the force of the impact, but she remained
hanging there, attached to the wall like a pendulum. From
where I sat it looked as if she were holding a hook of some
sort in her left hand. She swayed silently in a pendulum-like
motion for a moment and then catapulted herself three or four
feet over to her left by pushing her body away from the wall
with her right arm, at the moment in which her swing was
the widest. She repeated the swaying and catapulting thirty
or forty times. She went around the whole room and then she
went up to the beams of the roof where she dangled pre-
cariously, hanging from an invisible hook.
While she was on the beams I became aware that what I
had thought was a hook in her left hand was actually some
quality of that hand that made it possible for her to suspend
her weight from it. It was the same hand she had attacked me
with two nights before.
Her display ended with her dangling from the beams over
the very center of the room. Suddenly she let go. She fell
down from a height of fifteen or sixteen feet. Her long dress
flowed upward and gathered around her head. For an instant,
before she landed without a sound, she looked like an um-
brella turned inside out by the force of the wind; her thin,
naked body looked like a stick attached to the dark mass of
her dress.
My body felt the impact of her plummeting down, perhaps
more than she did herself. She landed in a squat position
and remained motionless, trying to catch her breath. I was
sprawled out on the floor with painful cramps in my stomach.
La Gorda rolled across the room, took her shawl and tied
it around my umbilical region, like a band, looping it around
my body two or three times. She rolled back to the south wall
like a shadow.
While she had been arranging the shawl around my waist,
I had lost sight of Rosa. When I looked up she was again sit-
ting by the north wall. A moment later, Josefina quietly
moved to the center of the room. She paced back and forth
with noiseless steps, between where Lidia was sitting and her
own spot at the west wall. She faced me all the time. Sud-
denly, as she approached her spot, she raised her left forearm
and placed it right in front of her face, as if she wanted to
block me from her view. She hid half of her face for an
instant behind her forearm. She lowered it and raised it again,
that time hiding her entire face. She repeated the movement
of lowering and raising her left forearm countless times, as
she paced soundlessly from one side of the room to the other.
Every time she raised her forearm a bigger portion of her
body disappeared from my view. A moment came when she
had hidden her entire body, puffed up with clothes, behind
her thin forearm.
It was as if by blocking her view of my body, sitting ten to