A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house across the road as they sit silently smoking, hands and faces pale against their dark clothes. She invents identities for the trio: they are criminals or abandoned spinsters. Sinister or pathetic. Curiosity grows into obsession: she imagines them as painted saintly icons, golden against a dark wall, ‘flies crawling across their faces… the first threads of a spider’s web spun from their eyes’.
People in the Room is set in the early 20th century in the affluent Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Belgrano, where the author lived as a child. The idea came to her when she first saw the triple portrait of the Brontë sisters that originally included the artist, their brother Branwell, who then painted himself out, leaving a blurred shape on the canvas. A fitting inspiration for a narrative where shadowy characters reveal only fragments of their lives, seen always through the eyes of the 17-year-old spy.
She becomes convinced that meeting the women is her ‘appointed destiny’, and in a daring manipulative ploy she intercepts a telegram delivery, rings the doorbell and becomes part of their dark, dreamlike world, where unexplained crucial events took place long ago.
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