she had been discussing before my arrival had interrupted her. She was talking about the new flowers and trees she had seen in the royal gardens. I looked at the nobles and the ladies; some nodded their heads, yes, yes, while others shook their heads, incredulous. One of the nobles whistled from time to time and exclaimed Caramba! I asked myself: What do they find so strange about a row of orange and lemon trees having been planted next to the royal palace and that dozens of orchids should have been brought from Japan? Yet it strikes them all as perfectly natural that someone should not be there anymore. They are there and my father isn’t: That doesn’t make anyone shake their heads and exclaim Caramba?
I watched the people who were standing and those who were walking about, and I felt a kind of emptiness that grew in me like a high tide, an emptiness so great that if it spilled over it would engulf all of Madrid and, what is more, all of Castile. I went to the window to see if the emptiness were still there, on the other side of the pane. Yes, it was certainly there all right. And in the middle of this emptiness was Miguelito, the laundry woman’s son, helping the gardener to water the allotments. I took advantage of the moment when my aunt was playing the harpsichord to cross that emptiness and go over to Miguelito.
“It’s great that you’ve come! Let’s play hide-and-seek!” he said by way of greeting.
“Miguelito, how is it that suddenly someone just isn’t there anymore?”
“What are you saying? I don’t understand you.”
“How is it that someone who has been here, like me and like you, someone who gave me a goodnight kiss from time to time, suddenly isn’t there anymore and never will be ever again?”
“But you’re there and so am I, so let’s go play at hide-and-seek.”
“You’ve work to do, Miguelito.”
“I’ll finish it later. You know what? We can go to the granary, take off our clothes, and swim together in a sea of corn.”
I thought that Miguelito lived in a world of things that distract and tempt, a world in which birds sing and a child can play at hide-and-seek or fly a kite. All of that had disappeared from my world; not a trace was left. I was sorry that there were trees and a great dark blue sky around me. I felt as if these things were squandered on me, as if they were superfluous, things that someone should have saved the trouble of making. I walked past the cages of birds and animals.
“Miguelito, open up the cage of the roe deer for me!”
The roe deer stopped chewing and looked up at me with its sad, wet, unblinking eyes. One look from those eyes is enough for me to know that he understands me, I thought, that he shares everything with me. Little roe deer, why is someone who was always there suddenly not there anymore? And you, do you also live in a vacuum that engulfs and paralyzes you? How can you live in that cage? A few steps over there, a few steps over here, you can’t even jump. My grandfather says that the most important thing of all is liberty. He doesn’t tell me what to do; I have no obligations. Grandfather was reading about this type of education precisely when I was born. Rousseau’s book Emile had just come out, as if the French philosopher had read my grandfather’s own thoughts. He wanted me to be named Emília, but my parents decided they would name me after Santa Teresa de Jesús, who had stayed at our house when she was in Madrid. So they christened me María Teresa, but grandfather often calls me Emília. And he and Rousseau exchange letters laden with fire: Grandfather berates him for having relegated women to a kind of inferior being whose function is to serve men and for whom education and training are dangerous. Grandfather tries to persuade him that education and liberty are for all, for men and women both. He justifies this by using me as an example. He describes my freedom to do as I wish, to look at the sky and the tops of the trees, to be taught music and painting, to begin to learn through my grandfather the basic tenets of philosophy, and when it is over, in the afternoon to play in the garden with the children