Summary

A young girl named Joana looks out a window into into her neighbor’s yard, which is full of chickens, as her father works on a typewriter. The girl is incredibly observant about the small details of the room, like the sounds, or her own internal thoughts and feelings. She interrupts her father’s work, telling him poems she has made up. She also asks him to help her find something to do, since she has “already played” (6). The father sighs to himself, and then both the narration and the father wonder: “What would become of Joana?” (8).

In the next chapter, Joana is an adult, and is married to a man named Otávio. Similar to when Joana was a child, in the previous chapter, she is capable of incredible stillness, sitting for long periods of times in deep thought...