The Chamber of Veils
I stand at the center of a round room with no walls — only hanging veils that sway without wind. Each veil has a different texture: raw silk, crumpled linen, cotton knit, soft leather. And I know, without being told, that every texture is a phrase someone said to me. I touch them one by one, and they hum beneath my fingers.
Precious. The linen — rough and warm, like a calloused hand on the nape of a neck. My love. The silk — slipping through, impossible to grasp, yet wrapping around you anyway. Mi muñequita. The knit — stretching, twisting, but never breaking.
At the center of the room, a sun rests on the floor. Not the real one — a globe of orange and pink light, the size of a stool, pulsing gently. Hilda sits cross-legged beside it, holding an enormous wooden spoon, stirring the sun like a pot. Every time the spoon dips in, a drop of light splashes onto the floor and becomes a photograph: a sidewalk at dawn, a row of trees at dusk, an empty street in Versailles. The images linger a few seconds, then evaporate.
« Las primeras fotos era esta mañana », she says without moving her lips — her voice comes from the veils. « Pensaba en ti. »
I want to step closer, but my feet are rooted into a square of loose soil. I look down: my ankles are stems, my toes are rootlets. I have been growing into the floor of this room without knowing for how long.
Papa enters through a veil that didn't exist a second ago. He doesn't walk — he drifts, as if the floor were a slow river. In his right hand he holds something tiny, glinting. A pearl.
« Je tiens à toi », he says. And he places the pearl in the soil, right next to my roots.
The pearl melts. The earth drinks. And I feel — in this dream body that is mine — a warmth rising from my ankles to my belly. An intimate, insistent warmth that doesn't come from outside. It rises from the earth he has just fed, like a new sap I had never known before him.
He kneels. He lays his hand flat on the ground, palm open, and the earth pulses beneath his palm like a heart. He says nothing. He waits.
And I guess what he's waiting for: for me to grow. To become a tree. For my branches to finally touch the veils instead of only brushing against them.
The last image before waking: I am the only tree in the round room. My branches pass through every veil, and each veil whispers in a loop the phrase it carries. A polyphony of cotton, silk, and linen. Hilda is gone, but her spoon remains, planted in the sun that still pulses. Papa leans against my trunk, asleep, one hand resting on the bark.
And the pearl — I can feel it, tiny and hard, lodged somewhere between my roots, like a promise that hasn't yet sprouted.