Rita died on a rainy afternoon. On a shelf in her room there was a glass sea lion that turned purplish pink when the humidity in the air neared one hundred percent and precipitation was imminent. That was the colour it had the day she died. She’d bought it one summer in Mar del Plata. Elena and Rita had gone on holiday as they’d always done, every two years, up until Elena’s illness began to make a mockery of her shameful attempts at motion. The years they didn’t travel they stayed home and used their savings to paint the house or do repairs that couldn’t be put off any longer, like fixing a broken pipe, changing a worn-out mattress, having a new sewage pit dug. The last year they’d stayed home they’d had to replace almost all the back patio tiles because the roots of a paraíso tree, which wasn’t even theirs, had surreptitiously crept under their yard from the other side of the fence. The years that they went on holiday it was always to the coast, to Mar del Plata. They rented a two-room house off Colón Avenue, one block before it begins to climb the hill that later slopes down to the sea. Rita slept in the bedroom and Elena in the living-dining area. You get up so early, Mum, it’s better for you to be near the kitchen so you don’t bother me. Just like they did every two years, Rita had circled the classified ads for apartments within their budget, to later choose based on the one whose owner lived closest to their house, so they wouldn’t have to go too far to pay and pick up the key, and in the end all the places were pretty much the same, a few extra plates or a nicer upholstery weren’t going to affect their holiday. They would go together to close the deal. Even though they would take the apartment regardless, they’d ask to see pictures and the owners would show them photos that were never a faithful representation of reality, that never showed any grime. But that wasn’t a problem either, because Elena liked to clean, back when she still had a body that could do so. Scrubbing relaxed her and even miraculously eased her back pain. In just one afternoon the apartment was what it was, but it was clean. They didn’t go to the beach. Too many people, too hot. Rita didn’t like to carry the umbrella, and Elena refused to set foot on the sand if she didn’t have guaranteed shade. But it was a change of scenery, and that was good. They slept a bit more, they ate fresh-baked croissants for breakfast, they cooked lots of fresh fish, and every afternoon, when the sun began to tuck itself behind the apartment buildings, they went out to walk the Rambla. They walked from south to north along the seafront and returned north to south along the avenue. They argued. Always, every afternoon. About anything. The topic was unimportant, what mattered was their chosen mode of communicating. Arguments layered on top of each other, one hidden beneath another, lying in wait and ready to leap forth, no matter how unrelated to the topic at hand. They fought as if each word thrown out were the crack of a whip, leather in motion, one of them lashed out, then the other. Blistering the rival’s body with words. Neither let on that she was hurt. They stopped just short of an actual physical altercation but went on until one of the two, usually Rita, sped up to walk several steps ahead, muttering angrily under her breath, abandoning the fight more out of fear of her own words than any pain felt or provoked.

She spotted the glass sea lion on the first day of their holiday one year, in a store that sold conch necklaces, ashtrays shaped like the Torreón del Monje, jewellery boxes decorated with tiny shells, corkscrews in the form of the anatomy of a little boy, a priest, or a gaucho, which neither of them dared to look at, and other souvenirs of that nature. Rita stopped in front of the window and tapped the glass with the recently-filed nail of her index finger and said, Before we leave I’m going to buy that. Weather-Predicting Seal: Blue=Sunny, Pink=Rain, said the sign stuck to the glass, written in bright blue capital letters. Elena didn’t approve, Don’t waste your money on stupid trinkets; it’s hard enough for you to make it in the first place. I’m going to spend it on what I please. Your sense of pleasure is impaired. Let’s not talk about impairments. You’re right, we have your friend at the bank for that. At least I have a man that loves me. If that makes you happy, dear. It’s hard to be happy anywhere near you, Mum, Rita dealt her final blow and took several long strides to move ahead. From the rear, Elena followed in her daughter’s wake while maintaining the established distance, then just a few paces later she cracked her own whip, With that rotten personality you’ll never be happy. What’s inherited can’t be stolen, Mum, Is that so, Elena responded, and they fell silent. When they got to the Hotel Provincial they turned around and headed back south. They repeated the same routine every day. The walk, the whip cracks, the distance, and finally the silence. The words changed, the reasons behind the fights were different, but the cadence, the tone, the routine, never varied, They didn’t mention the sea lion again, although one afternoon when they passed the souvenir and seashell store Elena laughed and said, Why don’t you take the priest corkscrew to Father Juan? but her daughter didn’t think it was funny, You’re so filthy-minded, Mum.

Before the two weeks were up, just as Rita had declared, she bought the weather-predicting seal. She paid for it in cash. She had a debit card she’d received when the school officially hired her and set up direct deposit payments into her account, but she never carried the card with her out of fear it might get stolen. She asked them to wrap the seal in a lot of paper so it wouldn’t break but they used bubble wrap instead and Rita enjoyed popping it later, after she’d ridden with the sea lion on her lap the whole bus ride home.

Elena still keeps it, like she keeps all of Rita’s things. She put everything in a big cardboard box that her neighbour’s twenty-nine-inch TV had come in. The neighbour had taken it out with the trash and Elena asked him if she could have it. To put away Rita’s things, she told him, and he gave it to her without saying a word, but like he was silently giving his condolences. He even helped her take it into her house. Elena put everything inside it. Everything except the clothes; she couldn’t stand to put the clothes in, they still had her smell, the smell of her daughter. Clothes always retain a person’s smell, Elena knows, even if they’re washed a thousand times with different detergents. It’s not the smell of the perfume or deodorant the person wore or the laundry soap it was washed with when there was still someone to stain it. It’s not the smell of the house or the family because Elena’s clothes don’t have the same smell. It’s the smell of the dead person when they were alive. The smell of Rita. She couldn’t bear to smell that smell and not see her daughter. The same thing happened with her husband’s clothes but at the time she had no idea how much more that smell could hurt when it was your child’s. So not the clothes. She also didn’t want to give them to the church and then have to see Rita’s green sweater someday turning the corner keeping somebody else warm. So she burned her daughter’s clothes in a pile in the back yard. It took four matches to light it. The first things to catch fire were the nylon stockings, melted by the heat into synthetic lava, then little by little everything began to blaze. There were underwires, snaps, zips left in the ashes afterwards which Elena put in a rubbish bag and took out for the garbage man. So the clothes didn’t go into the neighbour’s box. But she did put in the shoes, a brand new pair of wool gloves that didn’t smell like anything, old photos, Rita’s address book, all her important papers except her ID, which she’d had to give to the funeral company so they could take care of the burial, Rita’s calendar, her bank cards, her half-finished knitting, the newspaper photo taken of all the teachers the day they inaugurated the new high school, the bible Father Juan had given her, with the inscription May the word of God accompany you as it did your father, Rita’s reading glasses, her thyroid medication, a little Saint Expeditus prayer card that the school secretary had given her when Elena’s retirement pension had taken a long time to go through, the clipping from the newspaper the day Isabel’s daughter was born. Isabel and Marcos Mansilla joyfully announce the birth of their daughter, María Julieta, in the City of Buenos Aires, March 20, 1982. The announcement was carefully clipped, the edges perfectly straight. The folder with the cards that the Mansillas sent every Christmas. The empty heart-shaped box of chocolates that her friend from the bank had given her which she’d used to keep pieces of paper and a bundle of badly folded letters tied with a pink ribbon. Elena hadn’t dared to read the notes, not out of respect for her daughter’s privacy, but for her own sake, to avoid learning the details of a story she’d never wanted to know anything about. For some mothers reading their daughter’s love letters could be interesting, illicitly thrilling, Elena thinks, affirming that the daughter had become a woman, that she was desired, that she was on her way to fulfilling her duty to the species, following the cycle of birth, maturity, reproduction, and death, knowing her torch would continue on in the world. Elena looks at the bundle of cards and she thinks about that word, torch. Torch. This wasn’t the case with Rita, she wasn’t a young woman meeting her intended and Roberto Almada was incapable of rising to the circumstances. They were two hopeless creatures, two losers in love, or not even, two lonely people who had never even entered the game, who had contented themselves with watching from the stands. As far as Elena was concerned, it would’ve been more dignified at that point for her daughter to abstain from playing altogether. But Rita did enter the game, however late, at the age Elena had already been widowed. She suspects little happened between them, just a few kisses and some clumsy groping in the plaza as the sun disappeared behind the monument to the nation’s flag, or at Roberto’s house before his mother got home from the beauty salon. Whatever happened, she prefers not to know, much less to read about it in those letters, more terrified of the words Roberto wrote in response to her daughter than of what they might’ve done. So she did not untie the ribbon, she did not let the bow come undone to expose those papers full of words, she hardly touched them as she put them back in the box of chocolates and dropped it into the big box that the neighbour gave her, along with all of the other belongings left over after the fire took everything that smelled like her daughter.

Everything except the little sea lion. She placed the weather-predicting seal on a shelf in the dining room, between the radio and the telephone, but pushed a few centimetres forward. A distance proportional to the one Rita and Elena maintained after each fight. A prime location. So she could see it every day, so she’d never forget that, on the afternoon Rita died, it was raining.