The two men put on their jackets. That night they only walked along paths in the hills, far from the sea. They had to walk more than fifty blocks. The houses were dark on that windless night, and the men walked slowly. They hiked through bushes, clearing a path as they went. It took them more than an hour to arrive, through weeds rising in waves that broke at the height of their knees. Every now and then they lit the lantern. When they were about seventy-five feet away, the dog began to bark and they hopped the fence. The dog kept barking as they approached, until it recognized them and quieted down, nestled against them, stretching out and wagging its tail. It was a big house. They checked the front porch windows: the shutters were all closed. There were no porches on the sides of the house, so the two men slid along, pressed against the outer wall, until they noticed that one of the shutters was open: a faint light shone through the curtain, and the window was also wide open. They climbed slowly onto a rainwater tank, where they could peek into the room. The light was on. In front of a mirror a woman was trying on a bathing suit. She moved closer, stepped back, and moved closer again to the mirror as if performing a mysterious dance. She looked at herself from the front and from the side. One of the men shut his eyes.

The woman took off the suit, grabbed the nightgown that was laid out on the bed and put it on. Then she folded the bathing suit and left it on the chair by the window. The two men held their breath. They didn’t move for what felt like a half-hour until the woman fell asleep.

Then one of the men, intensifying the silence, stretched out his arm and snatched the bathing suit and a cardboard box that was on the chair. They took off running; they’d heard a knock on a door. They walked for a long time in the hills, retracing paths, feeling cheated by that robbery that didn’t require a skeleton key or lantern, in which they hadn’t penetrated the dining room to comb through the silver, with their revolver pointed at the doors. The two smelled the perfume emanating from the bathing suit as they pulled leaves from the hedges until they arrived at the house.

They entered after knocking and suddenly saw, as if for the first time, the woman sleeping in the next room, one bare shoulder visible above the sheet.

The birds were singing as they went to sleep.

The next day, when the woman returned from the dairy farm, they showed her the bathing suit and a light blue dress they’d found in the cardboard box. The woman threw her arms in the air: this is what you left at one in the morning for—what I lost a night’s sleep for! She examined the fabric of the dress, shaking her head: it wasn’t even enough to make a pair of short pants for the little boy, though the bathing suit’s fabric was a bit thicker. The men replied that she should put the suit on, since they had brought it for her, they would take her to the beach so she could swim. They always swam on very hot days—why didn’t she swim too? The woman shook her head again: rather than a source of pleasure, the sea had always been a cause of endless torture. The neighbor always encouraged her to go for a swim; when her neighbor had the morning free she would go to the beach in an old black silk bathing suit, swim near the shore, and come back covered in small seashells and pebbles, with algae tangled between her toes. She said that it was good for your bones.