When my mother told me what was happening to her, I was seized by terrible doubts, and by a feeling of anxiety that grew stronger even when I tried not to think about it.

Twenty days before this, my mother had broken her leg when she slipped on the stairs in our house. It had been a real feat to find a room for her in the Santa Rosa Hospital, the best sanatorium in the city. I had to leave very soon on urgent business, so it was crucial to get Mamá settled in a comfortable spot where she would enjoy all the attention and care she needed. I had misgivings about leaving her alone in a hospital, burdened with a cast and a painful fracture, but my job with the Tractors and Agricultural Machinery Co. demanded it. As sales inspector, I periodically had to monitor the different areas our traveling salesmen covered, as there were always a few who didn’t work their territory thoroughly, allowing our competitors to score phenomenal sales. I liked my work, and the company had always been generous with me; I was a “valuable employee,” according to my superiors. They paid me a handsome salary and gave me every possible consideration. Under these circumstances, I couldn’t refuse when they needed something from me. The only solution I came up with was to leave my mother in a good hospital, with a special nurse dedicated to her care.

During the three weeks I was away, the hospital kept me up to date on my mother’s health each day. The news I received was quite positive, except for a note that “the patient presents with a high temperature after midnight, along with pronounced nervous agitation.”

The day I returned, I quickly checked in at the office and then rushed to the hospital to see Mamá. When she saw me, she uttered a strange cry, an exclamation that conveyed neither surprise nor joy. It was the cry of someone inside a burning house when her rescuer appears. Or so it seemed to me. It was lunchtime. With great surprise I saw that Mamá hardly touched her food, even though they had served her favorite dish: smoked pork chops and puréed spinach. She was pale, emaciated, and her restless, trembling hands betrayed the state of her nerves. I couldn’t understand what had happened to her. She had always been a serene, composed, optimistic woman.

Ever since my father’s death ten years before, we’d lived alone with the servants in our enormous house. Although she had adored my father, she’d managed to pull through without him. Since that time, she and I identified with each other so closely that we had become like a single person, and we judged each other by the strictest standards. Her life was simple and she didn’t have financial worries. Between the money my father left us and my job, we lived comfortably. The servants took care of the house, and my mother had all her time to herself; she divided it between visits, shopping, the beauty salon, bridge once or twice a week, the theater, the movies. . .

In three weeks my mother had undergone a noticeable change. She had become a stranger. I could see for myself the nervous agitation I’d been warned about. When the nurse left with the lunch tray, almost untouched, my mother said to me suddenly in a very low voice, full of anguish and desperation, “Darling, I need to talk to you. Something awful is happening to me, but no one else must know. No one else can find out. Come tomorrow, I’m begging you. At one in the afternoon. When the nurse takes her lunch break, we can talk.”

I left her, promising to be back the next day. Very worried about how bad she looked, I went to see the doctor who was attending her.

“The señora is suffering from nervous exhaustion caused by the shock of her fall, inevitable with these types of accidents,” he said, without attaching much importance to it. I explained to him that my mother had never let herself be this affected by anything. “We also have to take your mother’s age into account,” he said. “There are many cases of serene, self-controlled women who, when they reach a certain age, become excitable and demonstrate symptoms of hysteria . . .”

I left the doctor’s office unsatisfied and uneasy. The doctor’s opinions were unconvincing. I didn’t sleep that night, nor did I make it to the office the next day.

I showed up at the hospital before one. Mamá’s eyes were red and her eyelids were puffy; I assumed she had been crying. When we were alone, she said to me, “I’ve been living through the most miserable days you can imagine. And you’re the only one I can confide in about what’s happening. You’ll be the sole judge who can save or condemn me.” This was what we had sworn when my father died: to be each other’s judges. “I think I’ve gone crazy,” she said abruptly, her eyes full of tears. I took her hands, tenderly.

“Tell me everything, everything,” I pleaded.

“It was the night after you left. I was getting ready to go to sleep when Lulu, the night nurse, came into the room at midnight to give me my medicine. I remember she put the pill in my mouth with a teaspoon and offered me a glass of water. I swallowed the pill, and at that moment, I don’t know why, I glanced into the wardrobe mirror and . . .” Mamá broke off abruptly and buried her face in her hands. I tried to calm her, stroking her hair. When she removed her hands from her face and I saw her eyes, a shiver ran through my body. We sat a while in silence like two strangers, facing each other. I didn’t ask her what had happened or what she had seen, or believed she had seen, in the mirror. Real or imagined, it must have been something terrible to have unhinged her so completely. “I think I screamed, and then I passed out,” Mamá went on. “The next morning I thought it had all been a dream. But that night, at the same time, it happened again, and the same thing happens night after night . . .”

After this talk with my mother, I too began to live out the most miserable days of my existence. I lost interest in my work; I felt tired and slow. I was like an automaton at the office. I think I’ve gone crazy . . . The story she’d broken off telling, her face transformed by anguish, her desperation whirled continuously in my mind. When Lulu gave me the pill, I glanced into the wardrobe mirror . . . I tried to take her mind off the fear I myself was starting to feel. I promised her I’d clear everything up and help her regain her calm and self-confidence. Given her condition, the doctors decided she needed more rest, and they only let me visit her on Wednesdays and Sundays.

I spent my days and the better part of my nights trying to find some explanation for all this, and come up with a solution. It struck me one day that maybe Mamá didn’t like the night nurse Lulu, either consciously or unconsciously, or that she brought some childhood episode to mind, triggering this strange situation. I immediately went to see the head nurse to plead with her to switch out Lulu. I felt sure I’d hit on the answer. Lulu was replaced with Miss Eduviges, much to my satisfaction. They made the change on a Thursday, and I had to wait until Sunday to see how things had turned out.

On Sunday I woke up early and got dressed right away. I wanted to be at the hospital at ten o’clock sharp. I rushed through breakfast, very nervous. On the way I bought carnations. Mamá loved flowers and was always pleased to receive them.

She’d taken great pains to make herself up to greet me, but no cosmetics could hide the traces of the inner turmoil that consumed her.

“And so,” I asked her when we were alone, “has the new nurse been treating you well?”

“Yes. She’s well-mannered, very considerate, but . . .”

“But what . . . ?”

“It keeps happening. It’s not her or the other nurse. It’s no one’s fault, it’s the mirror, the mirror . . . ”

That was all I could glean. Mamá couldn’t tell me any more. The mere memory of “it” drove her out of her wits. I had never felt more desperate and depressed than I felt that Sunday when I left the hospital.

And so I decided to relocate my mother to another sanatorium, even though the move would be difficult and risked damaging her cast. I couldn’t leave her like this, wasting away day by day. Maybe in a new setting she would calm down and forget this nightmare. Her current room was excellent, one of the best in the hospital: scrupulously clean, with handsome and well-cared-for furniture, and the mirror was simply the mirror on a wardrobe. The room wasn’t the slightest bit depressing; it was bright and sunny and had a window overlooking the garden. Still, maybe she didn’t like it there, and this predisposed her to the attacks. For days I searched for a good place for her, in the free time my work allowed me. In the top hospitals there were no beds available, everything was in high demand, and they followed a strict waiting list. And in the hospitals that did have space, the rooms were depressing, even sordid. With the state she was in, I couldn’t take Mamá to a place that would only aggravate her condition.

I arrived at the hospital that day completely discouraged. I was afraid to go into Mamá’s room and give her the news that I hadn’t found anywhere to move her to. She was terribly debilitated and pale. She looked like the shadow, the mere memory of the beautiful and healthy woman she’d been. We spoke awkwardly, with long pauses, beating around the bush, skirting the truth. When I finally told her it wasn’t possible to relocate her, she brought her handkerchief to her mouth and sobbed, slowly and sorrowfully, like someone who knows there’s no possible salvation. The wind swept in through the open window, and it too was heavy and somber like that October afternoon. The powerful smell of linden trees filled the room, suffocating me. She went on sobbing, dully now. Her pain and hopelessness stupefied me, destroyed me. I would have done anything to save her, not to abandon her in that abyss. I felt that night had fallen over her, covering her, and she tossed among shadows, defenseless, alone . . .

I resolved then to stay by her side and rescue her. I asked them to bring in another bed and informed them I was going to spend the nights with her. No one was surprised by my decision.

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That night, the first I spent in the hospital with Mamá, we had roasted mutton and mashed potatoes for dinner, followed by apple compote, coffee with steamed milk, and bizcochos. My mere presence had perked my mother up quite a bit. She ate with her usual appetite. Afterward we smoked a few cigarettes, the way we usually did at home, and chatted calmly.

Around ten at night Miss Eduviges came into the room to make Mamá’s bed and check that her broken leg was correctly positioned. I watched them very carefully, but both of them seemed to be behaving completely normally. I looked at the mirror. It reflected the image of Miss Eduviges, tall, very slim, almost skeletal. On her friendly face, framed by silky chestnut hair, her thick prescription glasses stood out. For a few minutes the mirror reflected her image, exact, faithful . . .

My mother was calm and showed no sign of tension. We kept chatting and making plans: our house had needed renovations for some time. We hadn’t done anything to it since Papá’s death. I suggested hiring a good architect to do the remodeling, but Mamá thought it would cost too much, and she proposed that it would be better to find a few laborers and oversee the work ourselves according to our own wishes . . .

Past eleven o’clock, I began to feel uneasy as the moment approached. I undressed slowly and very carefully, not wanting to let any sharp movements betray to my mother how nervous I felt. Above all I wanted to transmit calm to her. I folded my pants along the crease and laid them over the back of the chair, along with my suit jacket and shirt. In pajamas, I stretched out on the bed without pulling back the sheets. From there I had a full, unobstructed view of Mamá’s bed and the mirror.

At eleven thirty, Mamá became restless. She moved her hands constantly, wringing them, lifting them to her face. Her forehead was damp. She couldn’t carry on a conversation. A few minutes before midnight, Miss Eduviges arrived, carrying a little tray with a glass of water and a pill sitting in a spoon. When she came in, I propped myself up on my pillows to see better. She reached Mamá’s bed and said, “How does the señora feel?” as she raised the spoon with the pill on it and put it in her mouth. At that moment Mamá screamed. I looked at the mirror: it did not reflect Eduviges’s image. The mirror was completely dark and uninhabited, suddenly filled with shadow. Something started to churn within me and then contract, perhaps my stomach; then I felt a great emptiness inside, just like the void in the mirror . . .

“What is it, señora, what is it?” I heard the nurse say.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the mirror. Something, I was sure of it, was going to surface from that void, that nothingness, I don’t know what, but something unheard of and terrible, something neither I nor anyone else could bear the sight of . . . I felt myself shivering and a cold sweat ran down my forehead; the queasiness I’d begun to feel in my stomach kept growing, growing, until, unable to take it anymore, I gave a strangled yell and covered my face with my hands . . . I heard the nurse run out. With great effort, I made it to Mamá’s bed. She was trembling from head to foot. She was pallid and had a lost expression in her eyes. She seemed feverish. I pressed her hands tightly, and she knew then that I had shared that terrible experience. Just then, Eduviges returned with two doctors.

“It’s always the same thing, night after night,” they told me, “right at this time, she gets agitated like this.” I didn’t say anything; I knew I wouldn’t be able to speak a single word.

“Give her a shot of Sevenal,” they ordered Eduviges. Then all three went out.

The nurse came back quickly with the shot. While she gave it to my mother, I braved a look at the mirror . . . it reflected the nurse, Mamá’s bed, my shaken face. It was 12:20.

For five days, night after night, my mother and I suffered that terrible ordeal of the mirror. I understood then the change my mother had gone through, her desperation, her refusal to speak. There were no words to describe that series of sensations one felt, suffering through them to the point of desperation. And each time, the premonition that something was about to emerge became stronger, it was almost upon us. We knew very well that we couldn’t endure it. And so I decided that the only solution was to cover up the mirror. It would be like putting up an impenetrable wall, one that would save us from . . . Around eleven in the evening I draped a sheet over the mirror. When Miss Eduviges showed up as usual, a little before midnight, with her pill and her glass of water, the mirror was concealed. My mother and I looked at each other, pleased with our solution. But suddenly, beneath the sheet covering the mirror, amorphous figures began to show through, dark masses that writhed in anguish, heavily, as though making a desperate effort to cross from one world to another, or through time itself. Then we felt a dark music inside ourselves, a painful music, like moans or cries—inarticulate sounds, perhaps, coming from that world we had willfully closed off out of fear. We found ourselves pierced by a thousand swords of painful, desperate music . . .

At 12:05 it was all over. The shadows beneath the sheet vanished and the music ceased. The mirror was still. Miss Eduviges left the room, surprised that Mamá hadn’t suffered her usual attack.

Once we were alone, I realized we were both silently weeping. Those shapeless, imprisoned shadows, that desperate and futile struggle, had torn us to pieces inside. We both understood then just how foolish we had been.

We never covered the mirror again. We had been chosen, and, as such, we accepted without rebellion or violence, submitting hopelessly to what we could not change.

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From Behind the Gate by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, published by New Directions Publishing Corp.

“The Mirror” by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, originally included in Cuentos reunidos, by Amparo Dávila © 2009, Fondo de Cultura Económica. All rights reserved Carretera Picacho Ajusco 227, 14110 Mexico City. Translation copyright © 2026 by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.