Summary

Chapter 36 is related in the past-tense, with a limited third person narrator relating the thoughts of Ana, M’s wife. She had decided that she couldn’t bear to accompany M to the Book Ball, and had held a thermometer to a light bulb in order to fake her daughter’s fever—not because “M would actually check the thermometer,” but because “the black digits made it somehow more real” (288). She had begun to dread going to the Book Ball every year and compared it to "a visit to the gynecologist” (288).

The Ball always followed the same routine, as did much of her and her husband’s life. After the show, at which her husband and herself always had the same seats, they would mingle around the theatre and then settle down “on the stairs to the right of second-floor men’s room...