"I'm not asking if my memories are true. I don't know what I'm asking. Like a bird, I gather twigs to build myself a shelter; there I will protect what will be born. I still don't know what its form will be. To remember as if the present could shield us from the past. To write as if the fragility of childhood made us invulnerable." Thus begins this beautiful mestizo, hybrid writing, tense and at rest, between memory, biography, nonfiction, and fiction, where spaces, times, characters, and lineages oscillate between silences and languages, some spoken, others not. Testimony, confession, conversation between mother and daughter about loss, the phantom language, and the future: "You write something like this so that someone you love knows who you are and where you come from. I think of my son. Of telling him, 'Come, look, this is like opening our skin to see the tributaries of our blood.' A language is untamed life, a river of heartbeats. This is your ancestral punctuation."