Who knows me better than my lettuce-shaped vase?

PalmFor reasons that aren't relevant, we recently had to empty the house of a woman we didn't know at all. A beautiful life-size porcelain Jesus, her entire collection of Forges mugs, travel souvenirs—Düsseldorf, Ecuador, Israel—Julio Iglesias CDs, and Marisol vinyl records. All at our discretion. Small fragments of a life that, while it lasts, we believe gives more meaning to who we are, that reaffirms our identity, but that—in the end—don't end with us. When it's all over, these pieces are just a small testament to what we were, playing at being a puzzle, solving and creating enigmas.

So, as we go through the choices between what to throw away, what to give away, and what to keep, I'm forming a picture of what the owner of all those objects must have been like. Each drawer we open is another piece of the mosaic taking shape in my mind. From the three or four collections of glasses we found, I'm starting to deduce that she was a woman with a taste for pleasure, somewhat hedonistic (come to think of it, the kind of woman I wouldn't mind becoming). I'm trying not to let the few details I have about her interfere with my imagination. But I already know she was single, and that only reinforces the archetype I want to fit her into. I imagine that she—like me—enjoyed inviting her friends over for drinks at her place, and staying until the wee hours gazing out of the large stained-glass window in the living room, with views that also aspire to have it all: the sea, the city, and the mountains.

She was surely a woman who didn't want to be told what to do, nor deprived of anything. She smoked in every corner of the house: the holes in the sofa, the smell of a bar with a carpet from the last century, and the yellowing of every surface that was supposed to be white all betray her. That's how I see her, with indulgence and complicity, as we rummage through all her things without much thought, trying to apologize in return. She liked having beautiful things, even if only for the pleasure of using them on special occasions. Among the little treasures we're finding in the house is, for example, a caviar set. One of the pieces consists of a glass—for the crushed ice—and another container to sit on top—where the caviar is served—a function I myself wouldn't have known about if it weren't for the fact that my mother-in-law was served it that way, and suddenly she was able to tell us about it. These little eccentricities contrast with the more mundane objects, like a sofa faded from use and sun, a bed without a headboard, or the shriveled bathroom cabinet, which also reveal her as a person of simple living, who simply stretched her arm beyond her sleeve. And I think about what an intimate—even pornographic—act it is to discover a person through their everyday objects; and how unfair it is that one can't have a caviar set in an eighty-square-meter house without being judged pretentious.

In any case, I'm understanding. I wonder, in fact, if perhaps in another life we could have been friends. She seemed like a woman with obsessions and contradictions. It's not that I want to perpetuate the stereotype of the woman who lives alone, but her weakness was objects with cat pictures (the ultimate find is a plate depicting the Virgin Mary with Jesus, surrounded by felines, with no sign of Saint Joseph). On the contrary, among his cassette collection, there is also a tape with Arévalo's jokes, with some of his greatest ones. hits: 'ladybug jokes'And Catalan humor'. What can you do, we all have our own. guilty pleasuresAnd who knows if this wasn't the work of some suitor, thinking he was hilarious, poor thing.

I'm taking all this on, stimulated by the little character invention exercises that journalist Lorena G. Maldonado often does on her Instagram. My imagination is in better shape since I started reading her. She's brilliant even in the texts she writes for the storiesThe simple photograph of a graffito that says "big bird"You can let your mind wander, fantasizing about the kind of person who must be behind someone who decides to write this insult on a wall. Other times, it's the image of a man with the air of Paco Umbral, having afternoon tea at the Mallorca pastry shop in Madrid, that sparks the story, piquing your curiosity.

And after all that, I ask myself one last question: what assumptions would they fill my unknown identity with? Who would they imagine we are if they had to empty my house? Lots of furniture? What will they say about us, our houses, in the future: all Nordic, all minimalist, all with just the right amount of color?

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