Nevertheless, the Coletos, with the wiliness of provincials who are always afraid their good faith will be abused and who would rather make a mistake because they’re too clever than be right out of ingenuousness, demonstrated a certain reserve. Their greetings were extremely friendly, their conversation interlaced with a great deal of flattery, but they never left open a chink through which intimacy could filter.

Leonardo Cifuentes seemed to be the only one who was accessible. Julia was not unaware of his motives and was inclined to take advantage of them. But she feared the drawbacks of an indiscreet passion and the rumors it would give rise to. She sought to create more solid, more acceptable links.

The only family to whom Julia Acevedo had been presented up to now was Leonardo’s. She had, therefore, a pretext for frequenting them, and it suited her to do so in order to silence idle talk.

Slowly, cautiously, Julia penetrated the domestic orbit of the Cifuentes family. First came the parlor, with its demand for distance and ceremony; then, when the weather permitted, the galleries. The ferns nodded, the palm trees spread out their fronds, the climbing vines hung down. At her feet, the tiles were seeping with dampness and the roof’s crosspieces were suspended above her.

But though Leonardo was always very attentive, Julia found Isabel, for all her courtesy, inaccessible. Isabel’s curiosity—her only motive for making a momentary overture to the stranger— was satisfied by two or three not very explicit (and of course not very accurate) allusions to Julia’s past and an unremarkable commentary on her current situation.

In the end, Isabel’s predominant trait was her pride as a lady of Ciudad Real who disdains all interaction except with her equals and who recognizes no superiors. At every step of the conversation, she found ways to mark the differences that set her apart from the other woman. And Isabel’s unfamiliarity with the world kept her from being aware of the deficiencies in her own polish, the limitations of her experience and the almost nonexistent development of her faculties. She was a Zebadúa, and that fact alone placed her in a category no criticism could reach; she was one whose exaltation required no further effort, whose level of perfection required no further discipline. Zebadúa. The name was a talisman, and anyone born in possession of it was no longer in need of any further quality to add to his or her person.

“Zebadúa?” La Alazana once commented. “What a strange name! I had never heard it before coming to Ciudad Real.”

Isabel shot her a pitying glance. Naturally she hadn’t, since that code was not part of the common knowledge of the coarse and vulgar public. An acquaintance with it was reserved for the select few. But in Ciudad Real, no one who had any claim to being anyone was unaware of the significance of the name Zebadúa.