And it will be my birthday on the twenty-fifth—I’m a Libra—I’ll be twenty years old, and my adolescence will be over with once and for all. Juesú, what a relief! Normally on the weekends some young people come to see their families, but in September they start arriving en masse, the boats full every day. They bring gifts for their children, who in many cases they haven’t seen for months, and money for the grandparents to spend on clothes, things for the house, new roofs to replace those damaged by the winter storms. Among the visitors was Lucía Corrales, Juanito’s mother, a kind, nice-looking woman, far too young to have an eleven-year-old son. She told us that Azucena got a cleaning job at a guesthouse in Quellón, and that she doesn’t want to go back to school or come back to our island, so she won’t have to face people’s malicious comments. “Often in rape cases, the victim gets the blame,” Blanca told me, corroborating what I’d heard at the Tavern of the Dead.
