Occasionally he tried to say something about it to Fernando, whose husbandly passivity seemed to César to stem entirely from obliviousness. But Fernando only smiled, robbing the matter of any importance. Basically, if he tolerated Julia’s fractiousness, it was out of a kind of pity for a weaker being, a small, wild thing in captivity that lashed out harmlessly at those around it. Furthermore, Fernando still saw in Julia the enthusiastic girl who fell in love with him and followed him, renouncing her own future. Other elements besides those Santiago could observe added their weight to his estimation of her: the instants of abandonment and tenderness, the helplessness and dependency on Fernando which Julia had from the beginning of their relationship and which he considered to be still intact, certain childish traits of her character.

For the rest, the transformation Julia had undergone over the course of those years was so gradual that Ulloa, without failing to notice it, did not give it the importance it really had. Julia’s inner hardness was taken by her lover to be a superficial dissatisfaction; her cynicism was nothing but flippancy and her greed for wealth and prestige was only the natural frivolity of her sex.

This allowed Fernando to exempt his mate from the feeling that, in him, always remained strongest: responsibility. His passions had chilled, his tenderness had dried up, but no one would ever relieve him of the obligation to protect Julia and take care of her, to help her in her helplessness and her blunders.

But this attitude, which was held in reserve for moments of great crisis, did not come into play in their daily life together, which was increasingly routine and passionless. And if Julia had hoped that Leonardo’s presence would bring a new tension, a new interest, to her conjugal relations, she must have felt cheated. Ulloa’s lack of jealousy offended her as a sign of his disregard; she did not see it as a flattering proof of his confidence.

Fernando’s attitude was disconcerting to César, and he didn’t stop making veiled allusions to it until one day Ulloa condescended to explain his point of view: Julia had no friends and it wasn’t because she hadn’t tried to make them.

“I would be in the same situation if it weren’t for you. And I have the stimulus of my work, too. I get absorbed in the problems it presents, I see new people, new places. But my wife is shut up in the house all day long.”

“But that’s natural.”