At the next stop a priest arrived on his bicycle. He had tied his robe with strings so it would not get caught in the wheels. When he jumped off he forgot to liberate himself, and as he began to run toward the bus he fell on the white dusty road. But nobody laughed. They helped him get his chairs and candelabras out of the bus and placed them on the side of the road. The women then picked them up and balancing them on their heads, followed the priest on his bicycle, in the wave of the dust he raised.

The bus seats were of plain hardwood. The bus jumped like a bronco on the rocky, uneven, half-gutted road. Lillian had difficulty staying in her seat. The bullfighter was gently sleeping, and did not seem like the same young man who had suffered a symbolic rape before thousands of people.

Talking to the conductor in a stream of tinkly words like a marimba was a little girl of seven who resembled Lietta, Edward's oldest daughter. Lillian felt all through her body a dissolution of tenderness for Lietta, who, even though she was so deeply tanned, as dark as a Mexican child, had a transparency and openness Lillian loved. As if children were made of phosphorous, and one saw the light shining in them. The transparent child. Her own little girl at home had had this. And then one day they lose it. How? Why? One day for no perceptible reason, they close their thoughts, veil their feelings, and one can no longer read their faces openly as before. The transparent child. Such a delight to look into open naked feelings and thoughts.

The little girl who talked to the bus driver did not mind that he was not listening. Her eyes were so large that it seemed she must see more than anyone, and reveal more of herself than any child. But her eyes were heavily fringed with eyelashes, and she was watching the road.

Lillian herself must have been transparent once, and how did this heavy wall build up, these prison walls, these silences? Unaware of this great loss, the loss of the transparent child, one becomes an actor whose profession it is to manipulate his face so that others may have the illusion they are reading his soul. Illusion. How she had loved the bullfighter's fury at the bull, this gentle and tender young man sleeping now, so angry he had almost hurled himself upon its horns.

When did opaqueness set in? Mistrust, fear of judgment. The bus was passing through a tunnel.

Lietta. Lillian could not tell if she was trying to understand Lietta, or her own children, or the Lietta she had once been. She remembered watching Lietta's diminutive nose twitching almost imperceptibly when she was afraid, when one of the dazzling women approached her father, for instance. Dream of the transparent child.