Chapter 9: The medical record of the Cifuentes clinic

The gate of the Cifuentes clinic did not give way at first, but it did not need to be forced much. The padlock was red with rust and Daniel opened it with a flat key that he had found in the newspaper's reception drawer, inside an envelope where someone had written Cifuentes in the same dry handwriting as Alonso Seoane.

"If this goes wrong, I haven't come," he said, pushing the iron blade with his shoulder. "If this goes well, neither," Clara replied.

The building was two curves above San Román, half swallowed by eucalyptus trees and humidity. Inside it smelled of old bleach, wet plaster and those rooms closed for too long where the air seems to have learned to stay still.

The lobby had a sagging counter, a calendar from 1993, and a row of plastic chairs with their legs buried in gray dust. They searched quickly.

Daniel went to file; Clara opened consultations with the flashlight of her cell phone, brushing against stretchers covered by stiff sheets. Each door gave back the same thing: cold metal, opaque glass, empty drawers.

When she was about to say that the seal on the notebook led to nothing, Daniel called her from the back of the hallway. He didn't raise his voice.

It wasn't necessary. The archive occupied an interior room without windows.

The green file cabinets had labels eaten away by mold. Daniel had ripped out an entire drawer and left it on the floor.

Among folders of vaccinations, weight reports, and faded labs, there was a cream cardstock index card with a bent corner. Name: Julia Vega Cifuentes.

Date of birth: June 14. Mother's name: Adela Vega.

It took Clara a second to understand why she couldn't breathe properly. Daniel pointed to the handwritten line, in faded blue ink.

"Look at this." Pediatric observations: left retroauricular semilunar scar, compatible with an old wound. Clara put her hand to her head before thinking about it.

Behind his left ear, under his hair, he noticed the fine relief that he had been touching for years without giving it a name, like someone reviewing an old seam on his own body. "No," he said, but the word came out small, useless.

Daniel didn't touch her. That restraint, precisely that, was the only thing that didn't make her break right there.

«We can take a photo. And the token, if necessary. She denied and then nodded, as if both things were true.

At the bottom there was another notation, later, in different handwriting: recommended transfer. Review guardianship.

No signature. “This isn't just a disappearance anymore,” Daniel murmured.

No. It wasn't anymore.

The case was no longer on the other side of the table. It was on her neck, in her ear, in the automatic gesture of letting her hair down since she was a child so as not to show anything she had never known how to look at.

They left with the photographed file and a copy folded inside a medical advertising folder. In the parking lot, the afternoon wind smelled of salt and disturbed earth.

Clara didn't speak the entire way back. Nor when she entered the house and left her bag on the hall floor.

Not even when Daniel asked if he wanted tea, coffee or silence. "The bathroom," she said.

He turned on the yellow light on the mirror. She tied up her hair with one hand and opened Teresa's scissors with the other.

The first strand fell into the sink with a minimal, almost domestic sound. Then another.

I wasn't looking for beauty or change. I was looking to see.

When he moved it far enough away, the mark appeared clearly under the lamp: a pale crescent, barely sunk into the skin, exactly as on the token. He had the physical sensation of the ground taking a step back.

From the hallway came the vibration of a telephone on wood. Once.

Two. Three.

Clara raised her head. She recognized Daniel's tone before she heard his voice downstairs, opening a drawer.

He came out onto the landing with the scissors still in his hand. The mobile screen, lit on the entry console, returned a name that made the air in the house colder.

Esteban Vega. The phone continued ringing while Daniel climbed the first step and Clara understood, too late, that they were no longer just looking at her.

The House Where Nobody Asks

The House Where Nobody Asks