After an affecting pause, she gathered up the remnants of her faculties and said, while her tears echoed and her soul ascended with her sighs, “Yes, I am one wronged, a martyr to beasts dressed as men, a flower smashed beneath their feet. I was sitting on the edge of that spring when a horseman came by . . . He spoke to me with kindness and tenderness and said I was beautiful, that he loved me and would never leave me, that the wild animals roamed the open country and that jackals and birds of prey infested the valley . . . Then he grabbed me and pressed me to his chest and kissed me. I, an abandoned orphan, had never tasted a kiss till that moment. He sat me behind him on the back of his steed and brought me to a beautiful, isolated house. He gave me silk dresses, refined perfumes, choice meals, and rare wines . . . He did all that with a smile, hiding the ugliness of his lusts and his animal desires behind kind words and loving gestures . . . When he had slaked his appetite for my body and had weighted my soul with dishonor, he cast me off, leaving in my belly a living, burning flame that ate at my heart. It grew quickly, then it entered into this gloom between the fumes of anguish and the bitterness of lamentation . . .

“In this way, my life was divided into two parts, one weak and painful, and one—a tiny part—scream- ing in the quiet of the night, looking for a way to return to the vast expanse of space. In that isolated house that vicious man left me and my newborn, to suffer the torments of hunger, cold, and loneliness, with no helper but our weeping and sobbing, and no companion save our fears and misgivings . . .

“His friends knew where I was staying, and knew of my neediness and weakness, so they came one after another, each wanting to buy my honor with money and to give bread in return for the integrity of my body . . . How many times I seized my spirit with my hands in order to deliver it to eternity, then relented because it was not mine alone. My partner in it was my son, who heaven exiled to this life, just as it banished me from life and cast me into the depths of this pit . . . And now, the hour has drawn near and the bridegroom of death has come, after his long separation, to lead me to my tender resting place.”

After a profound calm, like the caress of spirits in flight, she raised her eyes, veiled in the shadow of hope, and said quietly, “Hidden Justice, concealed behind these terrifying images, you hear the lamentation of my soul, now commended to God, and the cry of my negligent heart. From you alone I ask and you I implore, have mercy and train my son with your right hand, and receive my spirit with your left.”