THE MAN WITH HIS BACK TURNED

Agustin Cadena

Daniela bought the mirror at the flea market one Saturday when she was passing by in her older brother's
car, and for no other reason but to make him mad, insisted on stopping. The mirror was 12 inches long by
8 inches wide at its base, and the upper part was finished with a Gothic arch. The brass frame was
scratched and dented in places, but in general still pretty, with vine reliefs and floral motifs. The mirror
itself was rose-tinted, an antique glass in which things were reflected as if blurred by the mist of the years,
as if they were reflections from the past, from long ago, not from today. Dani loved it. She didn't have
enough money to buy the mirror, but what she had was enough so that the vender agreed to hold it for her.
When she got home, she begged her father for a little, asked her grandmother for a loan and then at school
sold some CDs to a few of her classmates. The next Saturday she went to get the mirror. She didn't find
the vender, just his wife, an autumnal blond with a witchy look. When Dani told her why she was there,
the woman took the mirror out of a cardboard box where they'd hidden it. Excited, Dani paid the balance
due and ran home with her treasure. She already had a place picked out for it in her bedroom. The trouble
started that same afternoon. Not every time someone looked in the mirror, but often, they saw in the
background, behind the normal reflections, a man with his back to the mirror. It was fearsome, strange.
Because no one was standing there, and nothing else in the room could reflect such an image. The worst
was that sometimes it was there, sometimes not. And it always happened that only one person at a time
could see him. How then could they be sure of anything? The first hypothesis was that there was a ghost
in the house and it could only become visible through the rose mirror. But when they took the mirror to
other locations, the figure facing away remained the same.
The family was mystified. They wanted to find an explanation for this thing. Finally they arrived at a
conclusion: the man with his back turned lived in the mirror.
They didn't want to know more. All they wanted was to get rid of him. Dani went to sell the mirror back
to the vender from whom she'd bought it. He looked at her steadily with an enigmatic smile and offered
her less than half what she'd paid for it. But Daniela wasn't inclined to bargain.
She was already walking away from the booth when she chanced to hear the man murmuring, as if talking
to the mirror: "Back again."