The guilty parties are beyond her reach. How can she punish them? She makes up incantations, chants them. If only Teresa were here, her nana! When she realizes that her words have no meaning, no effect, she falls silent and returns to the point from which she started: the crime, a crime whose enormity is making her head explode. She stands up. It is midnight and the fire in the brazier has gone out. Stumbling, she goes to the candle and lights it. But the idea that brought her to her feet disappears in the pale light of the oscillating flame. What did she want? Yes, to complain, to protest. But not tomorrow. Centuries would go by before sunrise. She searches anxiously for paper and a pencil. Then she, Idolina, who can barely write, is filling one page after another with the large, shaky letters of someone unaccustomed to .doing things with her hands. It is a tumultuous narrative, an infantile confession, a last cry before drowning. When she finishes, she is shaking as if after a great physical exertion. She folds the sheets of paper and puts them in an envelope. Only then does she realize there is no one to send them to. Before blowing out the candle, she sets fire to a corner of the manuscript. In the sudden brightness, she returns to her bed.

Now she shivers with cold. The momentary relief granted by writing has disappeared. Yes, she could die. But not at some vague future moment. Right now. It doesn’t matter how, and she’s unable to imagine the details. She’s terrified of the pain, the supreme moment in which the body perishes. No, she wants to die without complications, without horrible delays, as easily as if it were happening in a dream. Idolina dead. A pale serenity endowing her face with a certain beauty . . . but her jaw drops open and has to be tied shut with a handkerchief. It doesn’t matter, go on. Around the bier the candles flicker, languishing in their funereal jaundice. And the guilty parties, what do they do? Laugh? Shrug their shoulders, indifferent? No, that’s impossible, that’s not fair. “I killed her!” her mother would moan, wringing her hands. “I killed her!” she would scream at the people who came to express their condolences and when they heard her they would turn their backs on her, horrified.

And Julia? Julia would have to leave Ciudad Real, tormented by remorse.

Idolina’s cheeks were wet with tears. She wept with self-pity, she wept as she imagined the bitter, vengeful memory of her that would stay with her torturers forever.