The actors didn't understand what she meant in her plays, and Dona Esmeralda was angry because she hadn't managed to explain to the actors what she wanted. Terrible arguments would erupt, as if the rehearsals themselves were dramatic performances. But they always ended with Dona Esmeralda getting her way. She was the one paying the actors' wages, she was the one with the greatest stamina. Those of us who worked in the bakery felt as if we were especially privileged – which partly compensated for the wages which occasionally failed to materialise altogether or were exceedingly late – because we had this opportunity to look into the worlds that were continually being created and obliterated on the stage that Dona Esmeralda had reclaimed from the stinking sewers.

There were moments of great magic on that small stage, illuminated by the ancient spotlights, which would sometimes go dark with a powerful bang. I can still see the way spirits hovered over the stage in the form of yellow cloth flowers that Dona Esmeralda herself scattered, hanging aloft among the treacherously rotten catwalks up in the flies. It gives me shivers to remember the slave ships with their groaning cargo, which glided across the stage with fluttering white sails stitched together from old sheets and flour sacks, and an anchor that looked as if it weighed a thousand kilos, even though it was only papier mâché stretched over a chicken-wire frame. The actors roamed through time and space with Dona Esmeralda's incomprehensible plays as their guides. We bakers, dressed in white, would crawl into the roof duct or sit on newspapers so we wouldn't get the seats dirty in the uppermost galleries, and whenever we laughed, it was a signal to Dona Esmeralda that a performance was ready and that it was now time to open the box office and announce a new premiere.

All of us were secretly in love with the beautiful young Eliza, Dona Esmeralda's big star.