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mystics the nuns presented as role models to us–people like Saint Teresa and Fray Luis de León–had to punish themselves, wear hair shirts, and choose to renounce the world for a life of solitude in order to find God and sanctity. I questioned whether my father’s adultery couldn’t just be a result of his human nature rather than an aberration. I could not be sure whether the negation of the flesh and all that masochism and self-denial was a trait of the Spanish character, if it was somehow related to the arid landscape, the desolate reddish plains of Castile.
    As far as mysticism was concerned, I preferred Father Vidal’s vision. He was a beautiful, broad-shouldered priest who had taken us on a spiritual retreat the year before. “God is vast, an all-encompassing presence, who is nevertheless aware of each and every one of us. God knows every one of us by name.” The idea of God calling me by my name, thinking of me as Lucía, had made me weep. It was during that retreat when I first knew the notion of a loving, gentle God. God is love, the priest told us. That seemed much more acceptable to me than the idea of a white-bearded lord tallying up everyone’s sins in a book he’d dust off on Judgment Day. That seemed like such a petty, narrow conception for a being whose intelligence was supposed to be limitless, who was all-powerful and all-knowing. Thanks to Father Vidal, God had become much more tolerant and compassionate to me.
    When I left the metro station, I hastened my pace to arrive at thebakery in time to return to school with my habitual selection of pastries. I made it to dinner promptly, and Mother Luisa Magdalena came up to me at the dining hall to inquire about my day.
    â€œI looked at Flemish paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth century,” I said. “Bosch and Van Eyck. And then I stopped for a snack on calle Goya.”
    She glanced down at my pastries on the table and smiled.

CHAPTER 4
    O n Monday night, I felt compelled to write to Isis during study period to tell her that I had come across her letters and my mother’s papers. I started to cry as I wrote. Unlike Mother Luisa Magdalena, who, listening to my words, could only visualize opaque images, Isis and I both shared the precision of our memories. If I evoked my mother, she would know exactly what I was remembering. She would be able to picture the curve of the perfect lips my mother was so proud of. She lavished on them lip liners and lipstick in colors ranging from brown to red to purple. To enhance them she barely wore any other makeup. She purposely let her skin look pale and applied just a bit of mascara on those black eyes of hers I had inherited. The result was dramatic, because my mother’s skin was soft and glistened like a pearl, so her bold mouth stood out suggestively, insinuating something ripe, edible.
    To know that for Isis my mother’s memory was filled with color and perfume and her unique gestures (like when she was nervous and wound her hair around her index finger, curling it again and again) released me from the necessity of explanations and freed my emotions. I didn’t want to get sentimental, but I found myself drowning in my feelings. If writing to Manuel had made me feel mature and perceptive, writing to Isis I experienced myself as a desolate, infantile girl deeply in need of compassion. I wrote to her from a scarred childhood, an orphan’s profound sense of abandonment I hadn’t even realized I was so torn up with untilit took shape on the page. My chest became stiff as canvas, and when I finished my letter, I left the study hall so I could go and cry like a child in my bedroom. It was as if it were the first time I had wholly internalized the definitive nature of my parents’ absence, the fact that they would never, ever come pick me up from school; they would never, ever be sitting waiting for me in the parlor, sipping coffee and nibbling on