She left the apartment slowly, noiselessly. She walked barefoot down the stairs, carrying her sandals. When one step creaked, she stopped. Perspiration showed on her eyebrows. A feeling of utter weakness kept her hands trembling. She finally reached the door and saw a man's outline behind the frosted glass of the door. He stood there smoking a pipe as Alan smoked it. Sabina's heart was paralyzed. She knew why she had always hated this street without issue. She stood there fully ten minutes, paralyzed by terror and guilt, by regrets for what she was losing.

"It's the end of the world," she whispered.

As if she were about to die, she summarized her existence: the heightened moments of passion dissolved as unimportant in the face of the loss of Alan as if this love were the core of her existence.

Formulating this, the anguish increased to the point where she could no longer stand still. She pushed the door open violently.

A stranger stood there, with red, blood-shot eyes and unsteady legs. He was frightened by her sudden appearance and muttered, leaning backwards: "Can't find my name on the doorbell, lady, can you help me?"

Sabina looked at him with a wild fury and ran past him, the corner of her cape slapping his face.

Mambo reproached her constantly: "You don't love me." He felt that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the legends, the trees, the drums of the island he came from, that she sought to possess ardently both his body and his island, that she offered her body to his hands as much as to tropical winds, and that the undulations of pleasure resembled those of swimmers in tropical seas. She savored on his lips his island spices, and it was from his island too that he had learned his particular way of caressing her, a silken voluptuousness without harshness or violence, like the form of his island body on which no bone showed.

Sabina did not feel guilty for drinking of the tropics through Mambo's body: she felt a more subtle shame, that of bringing him a fabricated Sabina, feigning a single love.

Tonight when the drug of caresses whirled them into space, free—free for an instant of all the interferences to complete union created by human beings themselves, she would give him an undisguised Sabina.

When their still throbbing bodies lay side by side, there was always silence, and in this silence each one began to weave the separating threads, to disunite what had been united, to return to each what had been for a moment equally shared.

There were essences of caresses which could penetrate the heaviest insulations, filtering through the heaviest defenses, but these, so soon after the exchange of desires, could be destroyed like the seeds of birth.