Without intending to, perhaps out of impatience, I found myself at the church very early. In fact, I don’t believe the baptism had even begun; the doors to the church were shut, and I had to peer in through the windows to confirm that Sylvia was inside. I saw her from behind, sitting very still, perhaps in prayer, with two other girls I didn’t recognize. There was a school for boys right next to the church, and the boys were outside playing outside at recess; I had to wade in through them to reach the window. The noise they made was incredible and contrasted starkly with the near motionlessness and chill silence that seemed to billow palpably out from the church. The day was already hot and blindingly bright; the whitish dust kicked up by all those boys in their games seemed to hold and amplify the sun. There were so many of them, I marveled at how they all fit into that one small school building. Their classrooms were confined to a gaunt, cheerless house of pale, newly-quarried stone, while the other facilities were housed in a gothic pile that might once have been the chancery. Since I had so much time on my hands, and no way of entering the church, which was locked for the occasion—I wondered if this unusual precaution had been taken to insure that those mischievous boys would not disrupt the baptism—I crossed to the former chancery, to escape the dust cloud and to find a bit of shade for myself.

There was a cloister around the front of the chancery – had it been a monastery, first? Or attached to one? A door stood open not far from me, and it appeared to open on the school library. It was a double door, painted vermilion red, standing in an ogival archway. To reach it, I had to walk around the corner of a cramped loggia whose arches had been converted to glassed windows. One entered the loggia from a tiny square, formed by an indentation in the outer wall of the school, and this was crammed with boys playing handball with small rubber balls. They were packed in this square so tightly that I had to elbow my way through them, and the noise, corralled by the three walls, was even worse than it was by the church. Through that glare and the tumult of the many boys, and through the double panes of glass, I caught sight of Ernest, sitting on the shadowy seat by the library door.

“What are you doing here?”