Here’s what happens: She sees the boy the first day the house goes on the market, while cleaning the kitchen between visits from two potential buyers. She turns on the tap to rinse out the dishrag and, after shutting it off and turning around, finds him on one of the chairs. A boy. About seven years old, with a dreamy air, in a brown school uniform. He’s not a figment of her imagination but a physical body, as solid as the kitchen counter or the refrigerator. Initially, the sight of him produces in her the slight revulsion that the rich always do—that theatrical, dandified air—though in his case tempered by childhood. The boy’s hands rest on his knees; he’s wearing black ankle boots with no socks, and his bangs fall across his forehead with impeccable arrogance. He looks like a thief, a small thief whose secret goal is to be accepted, though he makes no attempt to be friendly or to explain himself. After the initial shock, unable to determine what it is that’s off about him, she concentrates on his expression. The boy seems so at home in this space that it’s absurd to ask him where he came from; he’s a natural emanation, a being that emerged from the walls, from the air where golden specks of dust hang suspended. He sits motionless, as if he’s been awaiting his afternoon snack since some moment in the remote past. She, for her part, feels no fear, just a slight flutter. A bumblebee bangs against the windowpane from the inside, and for a few seconds this is the only thing that happens: the bee’s insistence, the empty kitchen in an empty house, the shock of a thirty-six-year-old real estate agent at the presence of a seven-year old boy watching her. A boy, she now realizes, who has not blinked, not once.
It strikes her that this is a sign the house will never sell. The house is like the boy: too refined, too impractical, a house made for that particular breed of mid-century rich who privileged rationalist architecture over comfort and ostentation. These days, no one would be willing to pay so much money for a house that neither is comfortable nor openly flaunts what it cost. That’s what she said to her boss the first time he showed it to her, that the house was hopeless, that they would spend months showing it to architecture students and, in the end, decide that it was a lost cause. Now, after a week spent smartening up the first and second floors, the garage and the yard, after memorizing the architect’s fact sheet and instructing the painters to make it flawless—this. She nearly bursts out laughing, but something about the boy’s expression stops her. It’s not just his anachronistic outfit; the fact that he doesn’t blink gives his expression a neutralizing aspect, as if everything captured in his gaze were immediately stripped bare, reduced to its most basic elements. And yet there’s nothing sinister about him, although there could be, in the same way that there’s nothing sinister about an overly realistic doll when you mistake it for a child, but there is once you realize it’s a doll. His very presence, despite being solid, has an instability about it. Her feelings about him, too, are unstable. It’s the first time anything like this has ever happened to her and, paradoxically, it doesn’t produce the uneasiness she’d have expected. For years, in other houses, the feeling that she’s being observed has sometimes caused her to head for the door, her heart in her mouth; but now this child is staring at her, unblinking, and she feels no fearat all, just a vague sense of revulsion at his privilege.
“What do you want?” she asks. And when the boy doesn’t answer, she repeats herself, almost brusquely,
“What do you want?”
Then he makes as if to get up, and she takes a step back. She’s still wearing the rubber gloves she put on to clean the kitchen, which make her look like something between office worker and housekeeper, and this makes the boy smile, or at least that’s how she interprets it.
“Listen,” she continues somewhat absurdly, as though speaking to a dog, “you can’t be here. Do you understand? Some people are going to come.”
It strikes her that, perhaps, despite the fact that she can see him there, right in front of her, the distance between them is infinite, and this produces a sense of relief. There are so many ways to avoid liability that this one doesn’t seem so bad. And yet the boy actually reacts. He gets up and raises a hand, waving goodbye. She does the same. And in that final instant, in the brief interval in which he turns and walks down the hall and she no longer sees him, she senses in his tiny body a sort of animalistic anguish, an almost unbearable anguish.
She’s never been one to probe, stir things up, demand explanations. She likes her job at the real estate agency, and that’s about it. She has a gift of sorts, the way some people have a gift for sports or a musical aptitude. From a very young age, she’s understood houses in a way that’s almost like an automatic reflex; instantly she knows what they’re like, just by setting foot in the door. Whereas most people see only concrete or brick, for her there are bodies, characters, flesh that is intimate and malleable. And yet, unlike the actual houses, the people dwelling inside them nearly always seem unreal, their faces and feelings inaccessible. Perhaps, she’s come to believe, the houses are just a pretext, a bridge to what she cannot seem to touch in the people themselves. She’s not sure. All she knows is that she likes houses, that she’s good at staging them, selling them, renting them, that she feels like a bridge between two beings who don’t know each other but are searching for each other. In that space, for better or worse, she’s found her place in the world. She doesn’t reflect on it. Ultimately, it is her lack of sentimentality that encourages others to be sentimental. She’s also not particularly bothered by all the things she cannot have. Beneath that façade, she’s essentially come to terms with her somewhat innate lack of sensitivity. Half-jokingly, she tells herself that her very character is sort of like the white lies that get used in classified ads: impeccable, light-filled, newly renovated. Expressions that can be met only with credulity or cynicism and are, after all, proven to be true or false not so much by a place’s actual luminosity or to what degree renovations are noticeable but by one’s desire for light or for everything to be brand-new. When it comes down to it, she sometimes says, it’s all a matter of desire. House hunters see what they want to see.
Perhaps that’s why she feels so thrown by her encounter with the boy. What is she supposed to do with that unresolved energy? For years, her fear of something like this happening has acted almost like a conscription of desire; now that it’s a reality, it almost seems an affront.
She was tempted to tell her boss about it when she stopped by the agency to drop off the day’s keys; now, too, arriving home, she feels the urge to tell the man she lives. with about it. But she doesn’t. Repeating to herself that she saw a boy who didn’t blink in an empty house has an air of corroboration, but it also underscores what did not happen. The boy did not reappear, though she was waiting for him the whole time, the almost three hours she was there. Perhaps that’s the reason why, when the man she lives with asks what her day was like, in the end she chooses to say it was fine and tells him about the house, a house for that particular breed of mid-century rich who privileged rationalist architecture over comfort and ostentation. Tells him that these days nobody would be willing to pay so much money for a house that is neither comfortable nor openly flaunts what it cost. Then, despite the fact that it partially negates what she just said, she informs him that today alone two couples came to view it, and though one couple ruled it out immediately, it wasn’t beyond the realm of the possible that the other one would end up buying it.
She’s seen the dynamics at work so many times it almost makes her smile: One of the two is strong, the other, weaker; one insists, the other resists. In the end, one of the two wins, almost never the predictable one, almost always the more logical of the two. The man she lives with asks what the house is like, and she tells him that it’s just under three thousand square feet, two stories, four bedrooms and three baths, plus dining room and library, even has a backyard with a small swimming pool. But the layout is so convoluted that it feels cramped no matter where you are. Not to mention the light, which is somehow practically inexistent despite the number of windows.
She realizes it now for the first time. It’s always the same: She realizes things when she explains them. And she now realizes that the house feels cozy when you’re walking through it but not when you stop. Then, as soon as she says it, she thinks about the boy again, about his unmoving eyelashes, the way he walked out of the kitchen and turned down the hall exactly like someone taking a routine path, over and over, relentlessly.
“I understand,” says the man.
She nods, looking at him, and thinks that actually there was nothing to understand, but he smiles and she smiles back.
She doesn’t love him, but that’s her way of loving him. The man she lives with is a big man, perhaps too big. She felt attracted to him when she first met him two years ago, the day she showed him the apartment they now live in together. She liked his body, and the fact that his heart was exhausted from a previous relationship, and his way of being, both a civil servant in the education sector and a free spirit. When they started going out, almost the only things she knew about him were that he taught in the university’s biology department and he’d written a book on the unlikely topic of fungi. After viewing the house, the man asked her to go for a drink and she intuited that they’d end up living together. He spoke about mushrooms with names that were impossible to remember—Crepidotus, Mycenainterrupta, Marasmius—and showed her images of otherworldly creatures on his cell phone, as beautiful and sinister as skin conditions, and she thought that everything inside him moved slow.
At first, loving him was almost a reflex. For the first time in her life, she decided to do what she was supposed to do, just to see whether, having done so, she would feel what she was supposed to feel. She took it as a given that sooner or later she’d end up leaving him, and that he would suffer, and perhaps she would as well, though in an indulgent kind of way. She liked his erudition and the pain he felt over his previous marriage, which had left in him a wounded hardness. She was curious to see how far she could penetrate that bone. Plus there was this: She had never lived with anyone. And he seemed the ideal person with whom to fail in that endeavor.
Then, against all odds, cohabitation was easy, punctuated by periods of idleness. The man she lives with, like the mushrooms he studies, slowly displayed his spores, which turned out to be delicate, and she has grown accustomed.
When he climbs into bed, the mattress dips under his weight and he turns out the light. In the darkness, she recalls him more clearly—the boy. His uniform is not brown exactly, closer to beige; his hair not quite black, more like very dark brown. He is a bit pudgy, but there’s something easygoing and good-natured about his weight. Below his bangs, his eyes are smaller than average, overly sensitive to light. He doesn’t seem at all shy, more curious. And there’s something out of place about the way he looks at her. Or, rather, the way his eyes travel her body, unblinking, crystal clear, slowly taking in each of her features.
“I saw a boy at the house today,” she whispers.
In the darkness, the man she lives with does not move.
“And?” he asks, after a few seconds.
“That’s it.”
“You saw a boy in the house and that’s it?”
“Yes,” she replies.
And when the man turns to her, she sees two watery pools with a slightly disconcerted glimmer. A second later he bursts out laughing. And she laughs too. In relief. At his presence. But more at not having said anything yet.
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Excerpted from LAST DAY OF A PRIOR LIFE: A Novel by Andrés Barba . Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted © 2026 by Andrés Barba.
