COLORED TRIANGLES

For a brief, infinitesimal moment, Carmen imagined that it was all over, that she had finally died, standing, in the crowded train car that moved slowly to an unknown destination. She opened her eyes and saw darkness and a yellow triangle. She remembered how she had gotten there, but she couldn't hold onto the thought because an old man's arm, blindly trying to make its way through the bodies without seeing her, squeezed her neck ferociously and cut off her breath. She moved to the side, a few centimeters, and managed to inhale a breath of fetid air. The car full of dying people, the murmurs that roared furiously in her ears like the buzzing of bees, the overcrowding, everything was still there, belligerent, persistent, wrapped in folds of acrid sweat. She remembered everything that could be remembered and knew that she was not dead, that she was still alive, that despite everything, she was still alive. The stench once again dodged the ceremonies and seemed to stab between her eyes; it poured down her cheeks, violated the seal of her lips, and reached her throat, causing her to retch. A thousand retches. She vomited nothing, because there was nothing to vomit, and another bit of air entered her lungs, that poor, vitiated air. Nevertheless, she managed to move a few more centimeters, and the old man's arm fell to the side like a dry branch breaking. She didn't look. She didn't want to look at him. And anyway, she wouldn't have seen much. A bloodless limb, a yellow triangle sewn onto the sleeve, just that. Another old man expiring, among so many.

She glanced around the packed car and distinguished lumps, minimal movements, shadows cut diagonally by sharp slivers of silver light. Among the people piled up like cattle, there were living and dead, mixed in tight and morbid embraces. The confused maneuvers to move away from them lacked harmonic sense and were too similar to others, to shuffling steps on rough floors, to matches being struck without energy against the edge of a box. Those steps, the last she had seen before boarding the train, were confined to a dubious corner of memory and diluted among shadows and the smell of rot. That’s why it was so hard for her to accept the humanity of that formless mass, that they were people, the same ones she had seen at the train station, flanked by guards in black uniforms. Those guards had led them from the trucks, through pens and enclosures, to a narrow, fragile platform built with planks placed on barrels to improvise a platform. The human mass pushed in all directions, flowing and swaying in a constant back-and-forth, describing incomplete circles and scanning the few meters of visible universe with anxious eyes. And at some point, the train swallowed them.

Here and now, in the darkness, the pallor of those carefully shuttered faces seemed to increase as the train ventured into strange territory. Double, triple ignorance, thought Carmen. Where are they taking me? Do they know who I am? Do I even know who I am? What do the images that assault me like flashes mean, exploding in the gloom of the car? A forest. Is the grove a memory or a premonition? An afternoon of sun. David. A checkered tablecloth. Ezeiza. Yes! It's the Ezeiza forest. But suddenly, thunder cracked, and a merciless downpour unleashed. We ran for cover. We ran seeking shelter and arrived soaked at the refuge where a man with a mustache was drinking mate while reading the newspaper La Nación. How ridiculous! He wore dark glasses when the sun was imprisoned by gray, almost black clouds. They were murky thoughts, so distant, so lost...

But thoughts could not be less murky than the atmosphere, though at some point, pushing through the clenched teeth of the shadows, Carmen managed to catch the fleeting meow of an idea. At regular intervals, there were openings intended for ventilation in the car, near the ceiling. They were little more than rectangular skylights, barely wider and taller than the door of a bread oven. Bread. A painful, sharp memory lodged between her breasts overwhelmed the idea. She was hungry. She had lost track of time, but it was a long, long time. Hunger is an infallible witness.

I have no way of knowing how much time, Carmen managed to think. Not once have the hatches opened since we left; they don't care, we'll all die, this time I will really die. A fleeting flash, maybe lightning, showed faces with startled eyes and defeated jaws; helpless mannequins, almost beautiful, with their triangles sewn onto their sleeves.

Triangles sewn onto their sleeves. She couldn't see her own triangle. It was black, dyed with a purplish glow, because those monsters had classified her as a prostitute, and she couldn't make herself understood. How could she explain, when she didn't know a word of German? There were some green triangles, quite a few red ones, a few violet ones, and many, many yellow ones... German is a guttural language, David had said, they exercise their throats more than their tongues. Where are you, my love, my David?

Wrapped in her shroud of bodies, Carmen tried to move her head. What did triangles matter! She couldn't stand it much longer. They had killed David, hadn't they? She hadn't seen them do it, but they had killed him. He wasn't one to meekly accept his fate. He had a gun and had used it, she was sure. But there were more of them, and they had weapons far more powerful than a pistol. What triangle would they have sewn onto David? Yellow for Jew? Red for communist? Or simply black, because he was antisocial, an agitator, a subversive? Is a rebel the same as a prostitute? It seems that to the Nazis, it's the same. They don't distinguish very well between one and the other, poor things.

On the verge of being split in two by a sob, Carmen thought again of the skylight, between an extinguishing flash of lightning and the terrifying coughing fit of a dying man, a sound so torn that it drove away all the bees and left a chorus of groans. Another one dying. So what? She had come to accept the idea of death so naturally that the first thunders, imposing themselves on the clatter of the wheels on the rails, sounded to her like a sign of an external will, the unequivocal signal that a fateful series of trials was coming. She recognized delirium and separated the smells. Her nose, suitably equipped, capable of distinguishing substances from one another, took control of the movement. It wouldn't be easy, pressed as she was between bodies and bodies and bodies. Her strength had abandoned her, but the others were castles of cards, smoke, cobwebs. It wouldn't be easy, but she would do it. At first, she hardly had a notion of what she was attempting, and it took another five furious thunders for the mists in her mind to clear enough. The skylight.

Shoulder, head, shoulder. Shoulder, head, shoulder. Suddenly, the shrill voice of an old woman spun like a top before fading into nothingness. Carmen didn't know the meaning of the words, but the tone hinted at the mixture of anger and helplessness that imbued them.

"Bus majte?"

"Sorry, sorry." Shoulder, chin, teeth.

"Kurve! Shmiedzi!" The words extinguished in the lap of a new thunder, and the groans rose an octave. The train braked without stopping; screeches and metal jolts shook the car, opening spaces between the bodies. Carmen, without knowing how, had managed to end up below the skylight, stupidly staring at the pale glow filtering through the opening. There were three or four dead in that spot: a man, a woman, and, bundled under the dome formed by trunks and heads, two teenagers. The man had killed them and then killed himself, like the unfortunate souls of Worms and Mainz in the 11th century. David had explained it to her. The Jews committed suicide when cornered. The yellow triangles. On the boy's triangle, there was also a letter "B".

"Are you Spanish?" Carmen barely glimpsed, in the next flash of lightning, a wing of curly black hair. For a moment, she thought of saying no, that she was South American, Argentine, that a strange chance had put her in that place, at that time, her, who should have been somewhere else, among other people. It was too complicated to explain the story of David, the ocean crossing, the escape through half of Europe. Escape, what an exquisite word!

"Yes," she said concisely, just as the glow allowed her to see the brown triangle. "And you're a gypsy." It wasn't a question.

"An unwanted person. Janika, my name. I'm Hungarian."

"Is that your name? Mine is Carmen," she whispered. It seemed very strange to her to have left behind the stench and hunger; that moment of pure astonishment looked as unreal as the storm outside. The gypsy was the first person she had encountered in a long time who could speak, even if clumsily, in her language. To confirm the absurdity of the situation, the rain lashed in horizontal gusts, and water penetrated through the small windows. Thus, the flashes and the downpour once again differentiated the living from the dead. Carmen extended her hand and touched Janika's face; a smile dissolved under her fingertips.

"Carmen," the gypsy repeated. She pointed to the black triangle on Carmen's sleeve and added, "Are you a whore?"

"No." An infinite weariness seemed to take hold of Carmen's will, preventing her from accompanying the denial with any gesture. She needed all the energy, all she could scrape from the bottom of her soul, to reach the skylight and climb down the other side. Was Janika slim enough to pass through the narrow opening? She was surprised to find herself thinking of something so absurd; she didn't even know when she had decided to do it. "I'm not a whore, no. Will you come with me?"

"Go where?"

"Out of this damned train." She spat each word with disgust, with hatred. She also didn't know why she involved the gypsy in her mad plan. In reality, she didn't know anything, she acted on pure instinct. But pure instinct also has a voice and a finger. Pure instinct dictated her steps, ordered her to take Janika with her, advised her to start piling up the bodies of the dead to form a mound and reach the skylight.

"Mer lojnicht," said the same old woman, as if the complaint reflected in advance her condition as a victim. Carmen wondered again if the old woman was angry or simply annoyed, though she seemed to be the only one paying attention to what she was doing. Even Janika looked away, as if trying to discover something in the darkness at the back of the car.

"Janika. This is horrible, but we must do it."

"Kerem."

"I don't understand you." She didn't understand why the others crowded, pulling away, widening the circle around the dead either.

"Nothing." Janika turned her face toward Carmen. The tears accumulated on her cheeks gleamed like gems and fell on the body the gypsy grasped by the ankles.

"Bus majte? Bus majte?" repeated the old woman, with her hands entwined over her head, forming a cap.

"What is she saying?" panted Carmen.

"It's Yiddish, I don't know. That we shouldn't do this we're about to do, it seems."

"Ij ken yein," the old woman whimpered, covering her eyes and letting herself fall.

"We must do it," said Carmen. She had regained her strength, although she understood that she could never have managed to pile up those corpses without the gypsy's help. "It's enough." The bodies reached up to their chests, and all they could do was pray that they wouldn't collapse as they clung to arms and legs to reach the opening.

"I lived in Spain, as a child," said Janika. Carmen looked at her for a second. The statement explained the language, but now wasn't the time for such details. "I have a knife," insisted the gypsy.

"I don't care. We must get out of here." Carmen thought about the knife and how little it would help if the guards found them. But the existence of the weapon acted as a stimulus; something is something, she thought, we'll see what it's for. She placed her foot on a hip and lifted herself with her hand forward, groping in the dark; one thing was to pile up the corpses and another to use them as a ladder. She grabbed a head of hair and almost let go; they were soft, fine hairs of a girl, young like her. But dead. Dead. Dead.

"They are dead; it doesn't matter," said Janika. "Come on, climb, quickly."

"They are dead," thought Carmen. "They are dead. They are dead. They are dead..."

She was startled by a dry crack, like a branch breaking. Yellow triangles, she thought, red, brown, green. She prayed for at least one to be green. She waited for the flash. No, it wasn't green, it was yellow. She stretched her hand as far as she could and reached the edge of the vent, a twisted metal strip protruding from the frame at several points. Taking care not to cut herself, Carmen put her fingers in the channel and tried to lift her whole body. But the weakness seemed to concentrate at that point, and she lost her footing.

"Don't fall!" said the gypsy. With remarkable agility, the girl climbed over the corpses and placed her head between Carmen's legs. "Take the knife. Stab."

"Where?"

"Stab." Janika stretched out her hand and placed the open knife in Carmen's palm. It was wet, sticky. Whose blood was it? She stretched her arm and stabbed the knife into the lower left corner of the frame, between the bronze and the wood. Janika pushed, and Carmen felt the gypsy's nose in her crotch, but she didn't care. She clung to the wall of the car and slowly lifted herself, inch by inch, using the knife as a support point until she could rest her elbow on the edge. "Does it fit?" The gypsy's voice was barely audible.

"What?"

"Your head, does it fit through there?"

Carmen moved her legs in the air and managed to stick her head out through the skylight. She received a gust of humid, cold wind that made her shiver, although the rain had subsided and the clouds, low and dark, continued to be threaded by lightning. The train's movement was smooth and rhythmic, perhaps because the tracks weren't in the best condition, which made her hope that she could complete the maneuver successfully.

Outside! She was outside! She let the wind whip her while she thought about how to get her shoulders through the narrow opening. Would the guards see her? She pulled back to extend her arm, placed her hand on the roof of the car, and with the other hand on the edge of the skylight, she managed to pass half her body until she was sitting in the opening. She felt Janika's fingers writing a message on her ankles; she couldn't understand the word, but imagined the gypsy was asking her to hurry. She did. Clinging to a miraculous ring on the roof, she lifted her body until only her feet were supported on the skylight and half her body clung to the edge. She was in an artificial, uncomfortable position, but it was enough to catch her breath. She lifted her left leg until it crossed over the edge of the roof, then the other. She couldn't believe it. She was lying on the roof of the car, but she couldn't stay there, she had to make room for Janika. Crawling like a snake, she moved forward looking for the end, where she would surely find a handrail or ladder to climb down. The gypsy surprised her by reaching her side in a ridiculously short time. Apparently, the girl was more agile than her and maybe it wasn't the first time she moved on the roof of a moving train.

"Silence. Stick to the... ground," Janika whispered.

"The knife?"

"I have it. You adapted quickly."

Carmen crawled again and reached the edge of the car. The idea of being caught between two moving masses terrified her, although logic indicated that the cars never touch. Anyway, the train was moving slowly, and the danger of being thrown off during the descent was minimal. She thought for the last time about the unfortunate people left in the car, about the old woman who had insulted her, about the corpses piled like sandbags, about the sound of breaking bones...

It couldn't be that easy; something had to go wrong, something had to go wrong.

The rain had completely stopped, and the cold north wind pushed the clouds like a flock of black sheep. Finally, the moon appeared, rolling on the horizon, illuminating the landscape with insolent, dangerous brightness. Something can go wrong, Carmen thought again. She couldn't see the ground, but there was no choice but to take the risk. And although breaking an arm or a leg was a forbidden luxury, she had to do it, force her will; death at her back and maybe ahead... Now!

With no room for new hesitation, Carmen let go of the crossbar and floated for a moment in the opposite direction to the train's movement before touching the ground and rolling down the slope. And as she rolled, she heard a dull thud, immediate. Janika!

It hurt, of course it hurt. A stab in the shoulder, like a titan's bite, and a dull drumbeat in the knee. Is that all? Fate had cut her some slack. Nothing had gone so wrong.

"Here I am," she whispered, not daring to lift her head, much less stand. The train continued to pass beside her, an enormous blind boa with no purpose.

Janika crawled to where Carmen was and hugged her so tightly that it seemed to repeat that brief moment of terror, death standing, suffocation.

They pulled away to look into each other's eyes; both had them full of tears. Carmen spoke first.

"Let's go. Quickly."

"No," said Janika. "Let the train pass." How long would it take for the whole line to pass over them? They couldn't know. Were there sixty, eighty cars? The irritating slowness of the great black form made the whole landscape unreal. It was matter flowing almost silently, an exquisite, exemplary caterpillar.

"It will never finish passing," said Carmen, distressed.

"Stay still, girl." The gypsy held her hand. "It will pass."

"No. Let's go."

"It's too soon," Janika said through clenched teeth, biting each letter.

But Carmen didn't listen, she pulled away abruptly and started walking crouched through the bushes.

"Fool," said Janika, but she followed her.

They had walked about a hundred steps when the last car, lit up like a ballroom, shone in the night. There was a moment of pure, heartbreaking golden light that seemed to probe the dull sound of the wheels, and then the screams.

"Da haut einer ab...!"

And then the handbrake, operated hastily and without delicacy.

"Run!" Janika panted. "Run, damn it, run!"

Carmen ran. It was very difficult in the darkness, stumbling over bushes and invisible stones. But she ran, and she couldn't afford to fall. The screams behind the girls multiplied. And an unexpected element joined the chaos, although for a moment, it played in favor of the race: the soldiers had turned on a spotlight and were illuminating the meadow, many meters ahead. That’s where the first shots were directed, without much conviction. There was a grove, maybe a forest, and the spotlight spared no details as it probed the darkness during the seconds that preceded and followed the shouts mixed with barking.

"Die Hunde...!"

"Lasst die Hunde los!"

"Dogs!" Carmen felt the icy grip of terror climbing up her back, biting her neck, like a greedy preview of future bites. Streaks of dirty white light crossed the space. Mixed sounds: howls, shots, shouts.

Carmen felt the ground give way beneath her feet and slid down a slope; Janika, beside her, didn't fare better, or did she, who knows? They were waist-deep in a stream; the water, icy and muddy, sought the most sensitive areas to complete the task started by the other calamities.

"Let's go, strength!" exclaimed Janika, grabbing Carmen's hand and pulling her. "The forest, ahead, let's go!"

"Yes." Exhausted, Carmen saw hundreds of white figures parade, the dead or nearly dead from the train. She also saw the forest, real or unreal, a few steps ahead, reverberating at the edge of perception. Let them kill me now, she thought, or never. I'll be indestructible. She watched Janika taking the lead to climb the bank and saw her float between fire marks, lifted by invisible butterflies. Then, the red stain on her back. "Gypsy!" She couldn't remember the name.

"Run, girl," murmured Janika.

"No, together." Carmen put the gypsy's arm around her neck and tried to drag her, but she was too heavy.

"Ostoba! Leave me."

"No," replied Carmen, stubbornly. She dragged the body a few meters toward the trees and they fell, embraced, on the wet grass, among broken branches and animal droppings. The dogs, preceded by their barking, were very close.

"Go. It's the end," said Janika.

"No. No. No."

She felt the first bite on the tip of her tongue, although the dog had bitten her calf. Suddenly, there were only tumultuous animals, searching for free spaces to sink their fangs and hands like fans, trying to protect the most vulnerable areas, barely by instinct. Blind, wounded, wrapped in tunics of bloody mud, the girls lost track of time and distances, and didn't know that the new shouts and shots came from the forest, not from the train.

"Vichodzi!"

A rough hand separated her from the dog's jaws, tearing the flesh without finesse. It lifted her as if she were a feather while other hands and other weapons dealt with the dogs. A breath. A second of air without sobs. Carmen looked at her bloodied hands and barely noticed the pain in her legs, where strips of shredded flesh hung. She clung to the first tree, using it as a wall between her and the skirmish, and through the mist that began to cover everything, she managed to see that the partisans were several and killed the dogs with shots and stabs.

Then the universe began to contract, black and dark blue, with some streaks and drops of red. It shrank to the size of a raisin and extinguished.

She was in a cabin, on a dirty pallet. A few meters away, Janika was groaning. Two or three men were talking in low voices by the fire, and a stew was cooking in a pot.

She woke up, a day or a thousand later, Carmen couldn't tell. The cold morning air kept her among poorly tanned hides; the stench and silence didn't get along well, and Janika's groans were no longer heard. Carmen tried to move her head and discovered that her legs were burning; a jagged-edged pain ran frantically between her feet and thighs; insects bit her body and buzzed around like hellish devices.

Janika is dead, said a voice in her head. Dead. The same rough hand helped her up. It was a young man, hirsute, and he also smelled like the devil. He had a weapon in his hand and Janika's knife at his waist.

"Du fashteit yiddish? Polish, polak?"

"No." Carmen felt crabs in her throat but had to ask about the gypsy. "Janika?"

The bearded man shook his head. No is no, in all languages.

"Allez." He smiled, a barely pronounced cut on a face made of stone by circumstances, perhaps overwhelmed by the audacity of having used a French word.

"Where are we going? I can't walk."

In response, the partisan hoisted her over his shoulder and adjusted his weapon so it wouldn't hit Carmen's ribs. They left the cabin and ventured into the forest. The man carried her with ease, as if she weighed nothing, but he walked cautiously, measuring each step. They moved through the forest, which he seemed to know perfectly, and after a considerable lapse of time, which Carmen couldn't estimate, they arrived at a clearing where some activity was visible. Four rather precarious cabins formed a rhombus around a campfire, and armed men and women were engaged in everyday tasks, not very different from those that surely occupied them before the war.

"I can walk," said Carmen. The partisan shook his head and tightened his grip. "Will you tell me if Janika is alive or dead?" The partisan didn't answer; apparently, he had already convinced himself that there was no way, in Polish or Yiddish, to communicate with her. He covered the last few meters to one of the cabins and entered resolutely, placing the girl on a filthy, smelly bunk. But the most surprising thing was discovering that sitting in the shadows, with a lit cigar between his fingers, there was a man.

"Calm down, girl," he said in Spanish, with a marked Catalan accent. "You are among friends."

"Who are you?"

"My name is Joaquím, and don't ask me to explain how I got here. It would take twice as long as it took to live it." The man stood up and allowed the light to highlight a horrible purple scar that crossed his face. He was short and robust, around forty, though the rigors he had been subjected to made him look older.

"What happened to Janika? The bearded man didn't want to tell me anything."

"The gypsy died, girl. What you did was... madness, heroic, but madness. How did you manage to escape the train?"

"Through the skylight, piling up the dead..." A sob preluded the pain. Carmen remembered the breaking bones of the corpses, the gypsy's nose smelling her crotch, the dogs, mainly the dogs; she couldn't get the dogs out of her head, couldn't detach them from her legs, to which they remained attached like puppies to a teat.

"This place is not safe," said Joaquím. "The Nazis are eager to bomb the forest, to gas it, who knows. We are stubborn, obstinate, and few things would please them more than to erase us from the map."

"Why did Janika die? She was my friend."

"They put a bullet in her lung, girl. Not even a doctor could have saved her."

Carmen bit her lips. The pain in her legs and the pain in her heart.

"Did you fight in Spain?"

Joaquím hesitated for a moment before answering; he wasn't sure if he wanted to do so. "I crossed the Pyrenees in '39. But I didn't wait for the French to hand me over to the Nazis."

They talked until noon, both celebrating the opportunity to do so in a common language. Joaquím, while they spoke, took the opportunity to change Carmen's leg bandages; he wasn't a doctor, not even a nurse, but war develops hidden skills at the bottom of despair.

"What will we do, Joaquím? Will I be able to return to my country?"

The partisan lowered his gaze and seemed to focus on a tobacco pouch hanging from his belt. "That was my last cigar," he said.

"I will die here, won't I? Where could they take me?"

"You ask too many questions, girl."

It was Carmen's turn to look away, not because she cared if Joaquím saw her eyes, but because she felt she was being unfair to these people who barely knew her and had risked their necks to save hers from the dogs and the Nazis.

"You're right; I ask too many questions."

Her legs improved against all odds. She would forever bear the teeth marks, like a grim embossing of tissues out of place, but she had saved her life. She spent her days thinking about Janika and found it surprising how time played a whimsical game with itself, stretching some episodes and shrinking others until they were almost invisible. She had met the gypsy, been united to her during the most intense moments of her life she could remember, and lost her. All that had taken no more than a couple of hours or much less. Then, the days fell like a downpour, hammering her memory with the handful of recollections of what happened on the train. The Nazis, the corpses, Janika. And that strange forest, over and over; that forest that seemed torn from a different reality, from another time. It was as if she were submerged in a fatal déjà vu, but not of something that happened in the past but of what was going to happen in the future.

The partisans left the clearing and crossed the forest to harass the transports, placing explosives on the tracks. Some returned wounded, others didn't return at all. Carmen memorized the schedules, and one fine day, tired of being a burden, she waited for most of the men and women to leave and left the cabin in the opposite direction. She had put bread, cheese, and water in a bag, and although her legs still hurt a lot, she imagined that the forest must have an end. She would emerge into a meadow, into a village where farmers, ignorant of the cargo the trains carried, oblivious to the Nazis and Jews and gypsies and Reds, would give her milk from their sheep and even a good piece of bacon. But there remained a decisive move for her plan to have a minimum chance of success: the triangle. Using Janika's knife that she had recovered—Joaquím had managed to get the partisan who brought her to the camp to return it—she carefully cut the stitches that joined the piece of fabric to the sleeve. It was no longer black, not even brown or gray; it had taken on an indeterminate color, as indeterminate as her own origin. I don't know who I am; I don't care either.

She threw the triangle into the remnants of the campfire and watched it burn in seconds. Again, time. Janika, a life in an instant, a spark of a thousand years. The fire resembled a burning forest, the forest of her visions, a treacherous forest hiding a terrible lie. She put the knife in her pocket.

She had several hours of light left, and the spring air almost convinced her that she was returning to the Rosedal in Palermo to spend the afternoon with her friends. It was easy. The ground sloped gently, and the gentle descent made the walk easier. She couldn't calculate, but she had probably walked for about two hours when the trees began to thin out, and she knew she was leaving the forest.

Carmen felt an unusual happiness. She left the nightmare behind, and it didn't even matter what might happen from then on. She put her hand in her pocket and squeezed the knife, sure of what she would do if she fell into Nazi hands again.

The forest opened to a freshly plowed field. She strained to guess what those people would plant. She didn't even know where she was. Poland? Germany? Potatoes, wheat, rye, perhaps. She wouldn't find corn or cassava there, like in her country. She spotted a road in the distance and quickened her pace as much as her mistreated legs allowed.

The car was very strange, green, a model she couldn't identify, although she saw the brand: Ford. A new model, in any case, too new. Around the vehicle, scattered haphazardly, as if bored, were four men dressed as peasants. For a moment, she feared making a mistake and started to retreat. But the men had already seen her, and after all, when I speak to them in my language, she thought, they'll be so bewildered that they won't suspect me even if they are Gestapo. Besides, they didn't look German. None of them was blond. Three of them had large mustaches, and all wore dark glasses.

"Hello," she said, waving cheerfully.

"Hello," answered the burliest one, in perfect Spanish. "We were waiting for you, Snow White. We thought you'd never leave that forest."

"Is it her?" said a very dark-skinned one; he looked Moorish or Indian.

"Of course, it's her, idiot. Look at her legs."

"The legs?" Carmen wanted to step back, sensing something twisted in the concept and tone: the men spoke in Porteño; it didn't make sense, what were those men doing in that place? But before she could stop, three of them blocked her way and grabbed her arms. While the tall one watched with crossed arms, the dark one snatched the knife, as if he had always known it was in her pocket, and another man, one with a boxer's nose, took a black hood out of his pocket and covered Carmen's head.

"What are you doing?"

"Straightening something that got twisted, skinny," said one of the men. "Or something that was always twisted. Did you already forget your friend, the Red, what he did in Buenos Aires? We didn't, skinny; we have very good memories. You'll see everything we remember."

The hood smelled like death. Time, as always, capricious, took Carmen in its arms and rocked her from one side to the other of eternity. It wasn't a brief, infinitesimal moment. This time she knew, without a doubt, that it was all over, that there was no escape. The big green car started off to an unknown destination. She opened her eyes and saw darkness, and although there was no triangle, she remembered everything that would happen from then on.

Original title: Triángulos de colores

Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Gaut vel Hartman