PROLOGUE

October 1938. Puebla.

The convent of Santa Mónica sat on a hill outside the city, a pale rectangle of lime-washed stone with a chapel attached at the south wall and a vegetable garden running down to a low fence of nopal cactus.

Teresa Torres came up the road on foot in the late afternoon. She was twenty-eight. Her shoes were the colour of the road. She carried a small bundle wrapped in blue cotton with the corners knotted, and a letter from her mother written on the back of a butcher's receipt.

The novice at the door read the letter without comment and walked Teresa down a corridor whose floor was deep red brick and whose walls were the same lime-wash as outside. At the far end the corridor opened into a small antechamber with two doors. One of the doors was already open. An older woman in plain grey wool stood inside the doorway.

The older woman did not speak. She looked at Teresa for a long time. Four or five seconds, no more. Then she stepped aside and gestured through the doorway, and waited.

The cell held a wooden chair, a small altar against the far wall with a cross of dark wood and a brass candlestick on it, and a single high window through which a square of late light came in. Teresa could see dust moving inside the light.

She went in. The older woman closed the door behind her. Teresa heard her footsteps go a few paces and stop, and not move again.

She sat in the chair.

She listened.

She heard the bell from the chapel start to ring for vespers in the way a bell rings when the rope is being pulled by someone who has been pulling that bell for a long time and will pull it for a long time more.

Then the ringing stopped.

Not finished. Stopped.

The light in the high window did not change. The dust kept moving in it.

Teresa felt something at the inside of her hearing, the way she had felt things at the inside of her hearing as a child, only it was steady, and it was in the room with her, and it was not a thought of hers and it was not a word.

She did not move.

She felt it for ninety seconds.

Then it was gone. The bell started again from the middle of its rhythm.

Teresa stood up. She did not cross herself. She walked to the door and opened it and stepped out into the antechamber.

The older woman was where Teresa had heard her stop.

The older woman did not ask. She reached up to her own throat and unclasped a thin chain of gold and lifted from it a small gold cross and held both in her hand and then, without putting words around what she was doing, she fastened the chain around Teresa's neck. Her fingers were cold and dry.

She said, in Spanish: "Other women have held this. Hold it in your hand when you go into the rooms where the seeing matters. The holding is the remembering."

Teresa did not answer. She closed her right hand around the cross at her throat. The metal had taken the heat of the older woman's body and was warm and was already cooling.

The older woman walked back down the corridor. Teresa walked behind her and out through the vegetable garden and through the gate and back down the road into Puebla and into the small room above the bakery on Calle Aldama where she was staying. She sat on the edge of the bed. She did not cry. She did not pray. She did not write to her mother.

She wore the cross. She did not tell anyone what she had felt in the small room outside Puebla. The only sentence she ever said about it was the sentence the older woman had said to her, and she said it only once more in her life, much later, to a girl in her own kitchen.