The woman knew those men. She knew how they were dressed, she knew by heart which button was missing from her brother’s shirt and the patch on her husband’s pants. She watched them arrive from a distance, their flame-colored scarves blowing behind them like small flags in the wind. After tilting her head from side to side two or three times, as if that movement would ensure the two men’s safe return, she went back into the house.

That house stood out in the hamlet because it had a tiny garden with flowerbeds surrounded by stones and seashells, with a swing hanging between two thick wooden posts.

All the children from the neighboring houses would swing in that garden, and so they called it the House of the Swings.

The kitchen was filled with smoke, the walls dripping with black coal residue, but everything was as perfectly in order as it would be in a recently scrubbed room while the woman cooked.

On the dirt road the two men were getting closer. The taller one had a darker complexion and asymmetrical eyes, the other had very deeply set gray eyes; the sun obscured one and illuminated the other like a wheat field. The door was still open, and they walked directly into the kitchen. The table was set. After taking off their jackets they sat down. The woman came and went: she took the pot off the fire and searched for salt on the shelves until everything was ready, and she brought the dish to the table and sat between the two men. No one spoke. The only sounds were utensils against plates, and jaws and teeth chewing in silence.

After a while the darker man spoke. He spoke of fishing boats, and the names of silver fish flashed across the table. The woman protested that they never brought anything back—not one hake, not one sea bass—but sold it all and always threw the leftover fish back into the sea. The blond man laughed: fish was food for cats, and if it were up to him he would starve to death before trying calamari or lobster. The other man spit on the floor: it was all the same to him, pheasant or pejerrey, beef or horsemeat. The silence returned; they opened the door and saw that it was a moonless night. They surveyed the darkness from sky to ground and closed the door.

After washing the dishes, the woman, exhausted, sat on the bed to undress, and the men watched without seeing her through the crack in the door. In and out of dreams she heard the men’s voices, carrying her down a very long road, at the end of which, rocking her son’s cradle, she fell asleep.

The two men were still sitting in the kitchen. It was just turning one o’clock in the morning when they left the house; they took a gun, a lantern, and a bunch of keys. They had chosen the house they were going to rob a month earlier. They had roamed the neighborhoods for many days, watching to see what time the lights went out and what the locks were like. They tried to befriend the dogs, asking the gardener several times for permission to drink water from the spigot. They slyly chose the darkest night.