“We’re getting off the subject, Julia.”

“Let’s get back to it: fear of this house, of its stories, of the dead and the living, paralyzed Idolina, nailed her to her bed for years.”

“But how absurd to torment herself like that over something she imagined, a hallucination!”

“A suspicion, Isabel.”

“She couldn’t speak? She couldn’t tell me, her mother, what was frightening her? How could she think I wouldn’t help her?”

“Perhaps Idolina didn’t have enough trust in you.”

“Yet in you, someone she hardly knows. . . .”

“Does it bother you that it was me?”

“I’m going to seem ungrateful, but I want to be sincere. It pains me to see my daughter, so surly, so rebellious with me, melting like wax in someone else’s hands. What secret potion did you give her in order to take possession of her will?”

“It’s a secret,” La Alazana said maliciously. “A secret she and I share.”

“I’ll never succeed in deciphering my daughter’s character. I thought it was enough to love her, pamper her.”

“Idolina complains that she didn’t receive the tenderness from you that she had the right to expect.”

“She doesn’t understand that we women weren’t born to live alone or ignored. We’re worth very little without a man’s respect.”

“Is that why you married again?”

Isabel lowered her face, confused.

“I don’t know, . . . It was so many years ago. . . .”

“Children have a tremendous memory. Idolina says she remembers everything.”

“And what is everything? The inventions of her jealous mind!”

“Blood will tell, Isabel. You’re jealous, too.”

“Me? Of you, perhaps?”

“Of me. Because of Idolina.”

Isabel suddenly stiffened.

“You haven’t had any children, have you?”

Julia hadn’t wanted them. In order to give herself fully to Fernando. In order not to tie him down with yet another knot. And also because she feared her own enslavement. No, it wasn’t fear of the pain or the danger. Wasn’t an abortion worse than a birth? Nevertheless, she aborted. Deliberately. And with so little remorse that the need to share her secret, even with Fernando, had never troubled her.

“But imagine what a mother’s love is;”

Julia shrugged in a gesture of obliviousness, indifference.

“For a child, one is capable of the greatest sacrifices.”

“But why generalize? We would do better to speak of a specific case. Of your case, Isabel.”

“I’m not an example. I was never indispensable or even necessary for Idolina to go on living. A nobody, an Indian, took over my place from the beginning. Now it’s you.”