Elena Jiménez

**Elena** is the narrator of the seventh season of Within the Wires. She organised a "scavenger hunt" for Anita in order to tell her about her mother.

## Elena Jiménez

Artistic interpretation of Elena by @krypey on tumblr

## Details

### Family

Rose Torres (wife), Anita (step-daughter)

## Voice

### First Heard

Season 7, Episode #1: Amarillo

> *"I’m going to send you on a trip. Lots of trips, actually. You don’t have to take them all at once, but don’t leave too long between them. Let’s call it a scavenger hunt. You’ve been so busy at work. Lots of late hours. Use up some government travel vouchers. It’ll be fun."* **--Elena in *Episode #1: Amarillo***
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## Biography

### Early Life

Before she met Rose, Elena worked in Medellín, Colombia. She had been in love several times and had more than one relationship, but all ended due to the first sparks of passion and excitement fading, and not enduring through the boredom of familiarity.

Elena went on vacation to Miami in 1973, specifically aiming to dance every night at The White Cat, a famous ballroom on Northeast 6th. She stayed at the Royal Palm Hotel, and planned to get breakfast at Rubin's Bakery, visible from her window.

On the first (and only) night she went to The White Cat, a band called "The Omega Tones" or something similar was playing. Elena was offered pot as she stood in line to get in, and when she went to hand it back, a girl behind her, Rose, asked to have some too. Elena liked her handmade jacket and asked her about it, and the two flirted and danced together at the concert.

Once, Rose was telling Elena about a book she loved, and in her passion for it, dragged Elena into her apartment, took the book off the shelf, and started reading it to her. She then lent the book to Elena, who found the margins full of notes she had made.

By late 1973, Elena ran a stationary shop called Morning Pages with her friends Zahara and Ana in Palo Duro, a small town in West Texas.

Elena and Rose began dating the same year they met, and Rose invited her on a handful of trips that she was taking for work as a travel writer, relatively close to home. When Rose went away without her, Elena missed her, often feeling that Rose would have appreciated her jokes and stories more than anyone else.

They had only been together for a few months when she got commissioned to write about Aotearoa. Although Elena thought it was much too early in their relationship to commit to such a long trip so far from home, she accepted anyway, knowing that declining to come would be a commitment of a different kind. They arrived just before Christmas, and stayed until April 1974. They traveled across both the north and south islands (Te Waipounamu and Te Ika-a-Māui), but spent the most time in Lake Tekapo. They visited Tāmaki Makaurau, though they only stayed there for a few days before going on to hire a camper van and drive up to the top of the island. They also went to the Te Rerenga Wairua lighthouse, the northernmost point of Aotearoa.

They traveled back down the mainland and eventually took the ferry to Te Waipounamu and explored it in the same way. At one point, they took a boat to Rakiura, the southernmost island. While in Aotearoa, the couple did sailing, surfing, hiking, whitewater rafting, horseback riding, and stargazing. For the last week of their trip, they stayed in Tekapo without any distinct plans, and just existed quietly in the space. They also met Thea there. They got fish and chips and ate them in the dusk light, and Rose laughed at Elena for diligently wiping her hands with napkins, while Rose licked her fingers.

As soon as Elena and Rose got home from Aotearoa, they moved in together. They often talked about going back to Tekapo, even planning to eventually retire there, but they never did. Thea was the only friend in Aotearoa they stayed in touch with long-term.

After their first meeting there, Elena stayed at the Royal Palm Hotel in Miami every few years, presumably with Rose. Bettina worked at the front desk from then up until the present - more than thirty years later - and she and Elena eventually became friends. Bettina would book her the same room, Room 37, which was a corner room with lots of natural light.

### Marriage to Rose

While Rose was adventurous, Elena was much more reserved, choosing to stay behind and worrying when her wife went skydiving in Edmonton. 15 feet into the entrance of the Sonora Caverns, Elena's claustrophobia gave her a panic attack, and she turned back. While traveling, an old woman in Warsaw told Elena that her rising sign was Virgo.

In 1980, Elena and Rose traveled to Jakarta for two months, staying (and dog-sitting) in an apartment owned by a woman named Kirana. Elena got very attached to Kirana's dog, a blue heeler called Nora, and did most of the care for her. To occupy herself, she also took a part-time job working the matinée shift at a local theatre, and saw a number of low-quality musicals. One night there was a heatwave, and the city lost power for twelve hours. Elena was kept awake by the heat and by worry when Rose didn't come back to the apartment, but she had just gone home with a man she had met in a new nightclub. A few weeks later, Rose discovered she was pregnant, and started referring to the baby as Anita.

They reported the pregnancy and Elena was surprised that Rose decided to keep it. Deciding that she did not want to deal with having multiple different doctors during her pregnancy, Rose chose to stop travelling so far for the duration, only taking short local trips alone, which Elena thought made her restless. After a few weeks, Elena began to feel Anita's presence in their lives both physically and emotionally. She considered the first time Anita kicked to be one of the most memorable moments of her life. In bed she would often run her hand over Rose's belly and sing to the baby.

While Rose was pregnant with Anita, she had Elena read up on midwifery in the hopes that she could deliver at home, but Elena thought she was getting carried away, and there was no way the government would allow it. Rose eventually had her child in the hospital in March 1981 and went through the memory protocols. Elena did not have to go through the procedure, though, and retained her memories of and affection for Anita.

After the pregnancy, Rose threw herself back into work, while Elena renovated the shop with Ana and Zahara. Elena received phone calls and postcards from Rose occasionally, but it wasn't until she returned home that she found out Rose had been having severe panic attacks alone in her hotel rooms, sleeping poorly, and missing deadlines. Elena suggested taking a break from work, which she did for about a month. Rose began experimenting in the kitchen and Elena would come home to a cooked meal every day. Soon however, Rose suggested they take a non-work-related vacation, and for a few months, Rose and Elena lived in Adelaide. They stayed in an orange shack with a lilac door on the bank of Grange Beach. They would often walk the ruins to scavenge, and Elena was most keen to find diaries and journals.

Rose and Elena eventually got bored of Adelaide, and Rose secured some work in Arusha soon after. Elena hiked Kilimanjaro with Rose, but found it very taxing and remembered very little of the journey afterwarsd. Rose had to support Elena much of the way and remind her to breathe.

Soon after Arusha, Elena and Rose went to Venice. Rose would recite a section of a monologue from *The Merchant of Venice* every time they crossed a certain bridge, and Elena said nothing at first, not wanting to admit she didn't understand the reference, but she eventually asked and Rose took Elena to a production of the play. During this trip Elena found out that Rose was interested in banned and censored literature. In Venice, Rose and Elena tried nougat which Elena regretted and Rose did not, saying it was all part of the adventure. Elena later teased Rose about not applying this philosophy to liquorice.

In around 1997, Rose retired from writing out of fatigue, and a few years later, told Elena that she was ill. The last time Rose and Elena went to Miami was in 1998 or 1999. She was already starting to be ill then. During this time, people around Rose and Elena's age were falling ill at an alarming rate, potentially due to exposure to old battlefields contaminated with biological weapons. It began with a rash, then headaches, fatigue, fainting spells and nausea, before eventually death. Their friend Ned, terminally ill himself, heard of a specialist at Glasgow University Hospital studying "latent contamination syndrome" so in 1999, Rose and Elena traveled to Glasgow.

One day early on, Elena went to a bookshop called Dalglish Books to see if there was anything that might help her understand Rose's illness, and came back often. She met the owner, Nicole, and eventually joined the local book club, which she never told Rose. Both the illness and the experimental treatments were hard on Rose, and Elena suffered from exhaustion, guilt and grief in caring for her. During the millennium new year celebrations, Rose was an inpatient as the drug trial had completely exhausted her. Elena continually lied to the book club, saying that her wife's medical treatment was going well and she only didn't come along to the group because she didn't care for books.

At some point, Rose decided to end her treatment and go home. Without the side effects of the drugs, she was less ill, and a few weeks after they left Glasgow, she suggested a last vacation, to Medellín. They stayed in the city for a month, learning a lot about its culture and trying its food, art, and dancing, talking to strangers. They both understood that Rose would be lucky to survive to see Palo Duro again, but it is unclear if she did.

Elena stopped travelling after Rose's death, rarely going as far as Miami. She later said that it didn't occur to her that she could travel, as she had never been the one to suggest trips. At some point, Elena also became sick with latent contamination syndrome.

### Scavenger Hunt

After her prognosis, Elena was in Amarillo to visit a former lover. She was in a queue at a coffee shop when she saw Anita through the window and recognised her as Rose's daughter. She considered trying to meet with her in person, but decided it was selfish and too risky, even if it wasn't technically illegal. She did, however, do extensive surveillance of Anita, learning her habits and routines as well as the details of her life and profession. She decided that she wanted to tell Anita about her mother, and spent over six months setting up a "scavenger hunt" across a number of emotionally meaningful places all over the world. She recorded the first of the tapes while she had only a few weeks left to live. She could still walk around, but it was difficult to get up and breathing hurt her chest.

In 2005, she was in room 37 of the Royal Palm Hotel, where she hid the second tape for Anita (the first one she would seek out herself). She also took a walk to the former location of the White Cat, which since its untimely destruction in Hurricane Kelvin, had become a cinema.

Elena returned to Aotearoa, staying in a bach close to, but not exactly, the one she stayed in with Rose. Unless the fish and chip shops remained unchanged managerially and aesthetically for over thirty years, she presumably sampled both the shop with the red sign and the yellow sign, deciding to recommend the yellow-signed shop to Anita. She wrote directions to the locations in each of the photographs she included in the package she left with Thea. She found Tekapo much more lonely this time, often imagining she saw Rose walking down the path towards the lake. While recording, she thought she saw someone on it out of the corner of her eye, but rather than Rose, it was Anita. There was nobody there when she turned to look.

Although a lot of the places she went to set up the hunt were nostalgic, visiting Glasgow again was a miserable experience. She was reminded only of places she had been miserable the first time she stayed there, and could see none of the city's charms. When Elena returned to Medellín, she became even angrier than she had been in Glasgow, reflecting on Rose's flippancy towards her own mortality while feeling her own weighing on her heavily in the present day. She expressed an urgent need to pass on Rose (and herself) to Anita before she passed.

After the trip to Medellín, Elena returned to Palo Duro and had to spend the next few days in bed, exhausted from her travels. When she began to feel better, she recorded the first of the tapes, which she then posted to Anita's apartment in Amarillo. The next day, she began recording the final tape. This was in fall. Elena left some camping gear with Gael, a young man who was minding Morning Pages since her retirement, for Anita to use. In the recording, she directed Anita to the memorial in town which started as a tribute to the victims of the Reckoning but was also commonly used to remember the inhabitants of the town since. She pointed out Rose's name, and where she imagined hers would be by the time Anita listened to the tape.

Some time after returning home, Elena noticed that living had become a little easier, with less headaches and nausea. Her doctors were pessimistic as she still could not keep weight on and was fatigued, but she continued to feel better.

Three months after finishing the last tape, Elena recorded over part of Side B, where she had been talking about the attractions of Palo Duro, to say that she had got a call from Thea a couple of days ago and heard that Anita had made it to Aotearoa. In the new recording, she said that only one location in the town actually mattered, and it was a house at the end of Mesquite Avenue with a mailbox shaped like a cow. She directed Anita not to go up the path and knock up the door, but to walk around the side and enter the garden. She hoped Anita would find her there, tending to her roses.

## Additional info

* The name "Elena" is a variant of "Helen" and means "light"
* Elena was a Gemini (Sun), meaning her birthday was between May 21 and June 20. She was also Virgo Rising, but it is impossible to further narrow her birthdate using it without also knowing the year and location of her birth.
* Rose and Elena had an open relationship, which was typical for the time, and both casually dated other people. Rose dated significantly more than Elena, but did not get especially close to other people as far as Elena knew.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Season 7, Episode #2: Miami
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Season 7, Episode #3: Tekapo
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Season 7, Episode #1: Amarillo
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Season 7, Episode #9: Medellín
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Season 7, Episode #8: Glasgow
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Season 7, Episode #4: Jakarta
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Season 7, Episode #7: Venice
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Season 7, Episode #5: Adelaide
9. ↑ Season 7, Episode #6: Arusha
10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Season 7, Episode #10: Palo Duro