None of it made any sense.

"Last year Angélica won the Laura Damián poetry prize, you know, when she was only sixteen."

I'd never heard of the prize in my life. According to what Pancho told me later, Laura Damián was a poetess who died before she turned twenty, in 1972, and her parents had established a prize in her memory. According to Pancho, the prize was very highly regarded "among the true elite." I gave him a look, as if to ask what kind of an idiot he was, but Pancho didn't notice. He seemed to be waiting for something. Then he raised his eyes skyward and I thought I noticed a curtain move in one of the windows on the second floor. Maybe it was just the breeze, but I felt watched until I crossed the threshold of the Font sisters' little house.

Only María was home.

María is tall and dark, with very straight black hair, a straight (absolutely straight) nose, and thin lips. She looks like a nice person, though it's not hard to see that her rages might be long and terrible. We found her standing in the middle of the room, practicing dance steps, reading Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, listening to a Billie Holiday record, and absentmindedly painting a watercolor of two women holding hands at the foot of a volcano, surrounded by streams of lava. She received us coldly at first, as if Pancho's presence annoyed her and she was only putting up with him for her sister's sake and because, in all fairness, the little house in the courtyard wasn't hers alone but belonged to both of them. She didn't even look at me.

To make matters worse, I managed to make a banal remark about Sor Juana that prejudiced her against me even more (a clumsy allusion to the celebrated lines "Misguided men, who will chastise/a woman when no blame is due,/oblivious that it is you/who prompted what you criticize") and that I made worse when I tried again by reciting, "Stay, shadow of contentment too short-lived,/illusion of enchantment I most prize,/fair image for whom happily I die,/sweet fiction for whom painfully I live."