A collection of nine short stories developed in surreal environments, some of them tragic, others emotional. Some of these stories have been already published in peruvian magazines or newspapers.
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The nurse, plain and simple, got the devil inside her and started changing the identification bracelets of the newborns: she placed the Rose boy's bracelet in the Lozano boy's wrist, and the Bertini girl's on the Bazan girl's wrist, and she went home, since she had already finished his shift game. But soon after, she repented and returned to the hospital. It was too late: the children had been picked up to be registered as required by law. So she preferred to swallow what she did and pray to God for the time to run and do its oblivion job.
Twenty-five years later, her ghosts returned, but in a way she couldn't have imagined. A young man knocked on his door: to the nurse's surprise, he thanked her for handing him over to the Lozano family, since his real parents, the Roses, were now rotting in prison for having sold themselves to the dictator who had just been removed from power. A few days later, another man, who said his last name was Rose, came to offer her a nice present — a top-quality bouquet — for not leaving it with the Lozano family, since the Roses made a lot of money while the dictator was in power; the visitor said goodbye, announcing that he was going to Aruba to enjoy the sun and women, while preparing his strategy to free his imprisoned parents—according to him, victims of the revengeful repression of those who were now usurping the word democracy. That same week, a young woman, Sofia Bazan, showed up on the doorstep to tell the nurse that she was a Lord's angel because, if it weren't for her, she would have ended up in a rehabilitation center trying to free herself from an addiction to painkillers, not to mention a terrible anorexia issue, in addition to legal problems and the like. Finally, a few days later, a limousine parked in front of the nurse's house, from which the famous pop star Xiomi Bertini, just released from rehab, stepped out of her vehicle to thank her infinitely for not leaving her with that family surnamed Bazan, who had nowhere to drop dead: she couldn't have lived in the midst of all that misery, because she was a celebrity and wouldn't abandon her tours and summer shacks for anything, to finish saying goodbye to the nurse while petting Aldo, her spoiled Pomeranian.
Once they were all gone, the nurse concluded that she could now be at peace with her conscience. Changing bracelets, ultimately, was the best thing she could have done in her life, even though life didn't exactly treat her the way she deserved. It was true that she never married, that all her boyfriends left her, that many years ago, after finally confessing the incident of the change, because it was something that kept her from sleeping, she was fired, her license canceled and as a result of all this her friends abandoned her; but it turned out that she had done a good deed after all. Although, of course, she was always curious to know why the devil got into her that night, twenty-five years ago. Why? Sometimes she used to stop in front of the mirror and, staring at her face, attributed her past actions to the doubts she had about her own origin, as well as the problems she faced trying to convince people, throughout her entire childhood and adolescence, of her version about her own birth. After all, it was difficult to make others believe — children, teenagers or adults — that a white girl could have really been begotten by black parents...
(Originally puslished by the Sunday supplement of the peruvian newspaper "El Comercio", April 14, 2013)
