Summary

The fourth chapter returns to Urania’s storyline in 1996. After returning to her father’s house, she hesitates to visit him in his room, instead talking to the nurse. When she finally goes up to see him, she cannot take her eyes of his chamber pot, half-filled with urine. In her mind, she compares the sunken figure before her to her memories of him as a strong, powerful politician.

After admitting to her father that she does not know why she has come, she starts telling him about her life: her solitude and her obsession with reading about Trujillo. Though he never speaks, her father reacts with agitated movements, especially when Urania asks him whether he let Trujillo sleep with her mother.

Seamlessly and without change in narrative voice or tense, the story changes to an imagined memory of Trujillo visiting her mother. Changing...