He understood perfectly. One of his possessions, a piece of his property had been seized: Catalina. And he had no means of recovering it but violence. To hit his wife until the pain (ah, the rictus that was the familiar companion of her face!) erased the strange look of distraction and absence. Yes: to punish her for her abandonment, her betrayal. Pedro felt naked, flayed alive, now that Catalina’s love, now that her need for him had been eclipsed.

The presence of strangers in his house, in his village, held him in check. And seeing them so attentive to the ilol’s desires, so obedient to her instructions, Pedro allowed himself to be overcome little by little by a superstitious respect, an obscure terror.

What irritated Pedro at first—the constant intrusion of unfamiliar women in the hut—later became indispensable to him. He was afraid of remaining alone with Catalina, he was afraid she would turn her eyes charged with forebodings to rest on him, or settle them on Domingo.

Fear of the fixed gaze of a madman, the gaze that does not discern, that does not rescue what it sees from anonymity.

Her gaze was the same for those who came to serve her, to worship her. Did she even know they were there? In any case, Catalina gave herself over with total passivity to the solicitude and submission of others.

Catalina had become something worse than an invalid; though perfectly able to carry out any action, any movement, she refused to do so. She lost the habit of attending to her own humble daily needs. She lay in wait for a distant ecstasy: she pursued it with the net of incantation, the trap of prayer.

Catalina’s place was in the cave. There she prayed aloud, accompanied by the chorus of the pilgrims. She invented a ritual in which the memory of old ceremonies once witnessed rose to the surface along with certain gestures that always express the need to propitiate the mysterious powers that surround us.

Catalina and her followers were creating a complex, delirious liturgy in which the ilol herself was the venerated center. Curses and praises came to pour out upon her, and from her emanated the light and the promise. Catalina did not make the slightest gesture without the certainty of being a flame by whose light the others glimpsed a divine reality.