When the assistant finished high school, she started to manage her father’s finances and to oversee some things in the fields. She didn’t paint or write anymore, but on her desk she had a framed photo of the Olingiris, and sometimes, when she was taking a break, she picked it up to look at it closely, and she wondered what the private tutor was doing, and what it was like to live the way an Olingiris lived.
She didn’t get married or have children. She left the countryside when her mother started showing the first symptoms of illness, the same year the drought finished off the vineyards and the crops. It was decided the assistant would travel with her mother to the capital, and they would live in the apartment her father had bought there some years before. The assistant brought the book about fish and fish tanks that the tutor had given her. The apartment wasn’t very large, but it was enough for the two of them. It had a window that looked out onto a street and let in a bit of light. They bought a table and two beds made of pine, and the assistant tore some pages from the book and stuck them to the wall like framed pictures. The assistant learned to cook, to make the beds and wash the clothes. She found work in a dry cleaner’s. Once the clothes were clean, they had to be put into the steamer, making sure there were no wrinkles. Lower the lid, wait a few seconds, and repeat on the rest of the garment. She also had to fold and perfume it. Sometimes there were difficult stains, and she had to bring them to the sinks in the back and use a special product. When that happened, the assistant chose the first sink, and while she waited the ten seconds the product needed to work, she looked into her own eyes in the mirror.
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When the assistant’s mother died, she quit her job, and as she was reorganizing the apartment, she found the book about fish among her mother’s clothes. It was the original one, the one that had been lost. She cleared off the pine table and opened the two books to the first page. She reread them side by side, several times. She thought that perhaps she could find a difference, because at first glance they looked the same, but she remembered the first one differently. It was hard to explain; she was just sure that there had to be a difference, but she couldn’t find it. She closed the books and sat looking at them for a while. She wouldn’t need them anymore, she concluded, and she stored them away together under the bed.
She waited several days at home, with no mother and no job, not really knowing what to do. When the food and money ran out, she left the apartment to walk around the neighborhood, and she came across a “Help Wanted” sign on a building that said INSTITUTE. The work was simple, and paid well. She was hired immediately. The money from the first months left her enough to paint the apartment and buy some furniture. She threw away the pages hanging on the walls. She went out in the morning in her uniform and walked to the institute. She unlocked the doors, filled out forms, went with the women to the changing room, opened the hall, set out the materials, monitored the woman on the cot, collected the hairs, tied the bag, delivered the bag, sent the women on their way, paid the woman on the cot, turned out the lights, locked the door. At home she organized the groceries, made dinner, ate in front of the TV, washed the dishes, showered, brushed her teeth, made the bed, and lay down to sleep. Sometimes the forms ran out and she had to go to the stationery store for more. Or the women on the cot moved and she had to discount points from their salaries. Or she couldn’t find what she wanted to eat for dinner, and she went to bed earlier than usual.
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The assistant went to reception and saw through the window that it was nighttime. She put the bag away in a cabinet under the counter alongside three other identical bags, and she locked the cabinet. When she opened it the next day they would be gone. Someone would come for them after she left. In the city, everything unseemly moved at night.
The women came downstairs in their street clothes and said goodbye before going outside. That left only the woman on the cot, who must be dressed now and waiting for her upstairs. She went up and opened the hall again, and was surprised to see that the woman on the cot was still naked. She was sitting on the cot, hugging her knees with her forehead on her arms. Her back shuddered. She was crying. It was the first time this had ever happened, and the assistant didn’t quite know what to do. She thought about leaving the room and coming back a few minutes later, but instead she took out her notebook, went over the accounts aloud, and handed the woman on the cot the ticket with her money. Then the woman on the cot looked at her, for the first time. And the assistant felt an impulse, her stomach contracted a little, mechanically, her lungs took in air, her lips opened, her tongue hung in the air, waiting, as if she were going to ask the woman on the cot a question. A question like what? That was what closed her mouth. Was she all right? All right in what respect? In no way was she going to ask the question, though the distance between their bodies was appropriate and they were alone in the building; it was just something slow-moving in her head. But it was the woman on the cot who steadied her breathing and said: