CATALINA REMAINED ALONE. As in a dream she heard the last steps of the last person who abandoned her. She would have wanted to cry out, grab and hold back this unknown person who was taking away, irrevocably, her breath and her reason for living, but she knew it was useless. She remained still, in the same position she was in when the idols were hurled down and abducted: with her face humiliated against the ground, breathing a miasma, an unhealthy redolence of trampled pine needles and consumed wax.

She was there for a long time and she never knew if she was asleep or awake, dead or alive. Sudden sparks of pain were discharged into her consciousness and quickly muffled by a remote fog in which a minuscule insect buzzed in a spiral.

Pedro González Winiktón stood watch at the cave’s threshold without resolving to cross it. The piece of refuse inside was his, but, just as he had been perturbed by the splendor that encircled the figure of his wife during the days of triumph, today he felt shame at her defeat and refused to share in it.

It was Domingo who rescued Catalina. In his own clay bowl he brought fresh water to splash on her wrists and temples. Without any fear, he touched the flesh that the crowd had worshiped as sacred and then repudiated as fraudulent. Catalina opened her eyes to the little boy’s charity and her breast melted in a sob of gratitude. She could not get up, she could not speak. Only her pupils dilated in an anguished questioning: Why? Why?

Who could have answered her? With Lorenzo’s help, Pedro put together a litter. Between the two of them, they transported Catalina back to her hut which was now silent, with no other presence than Marcela’s aloofness.

They put Catalina down next to the fire. Her motionless eyes stared into the flame’s mobility. And did not turn away even when the flame went out.

Catalina’s convalescence was slow, troublesome, unassisted. The pulsetakers refused to attend to her, the brujos proffered weak pretexts for not fulfilling their duty. They were afraid to confront, in the person of the vanquished ilol, a reality they had not mastered, facts they had not succeeded in defining.

Only those closest to Catalina cared for her. Marcela placed infusions of beneficial herbs within her reach, simple dishes that the sick woman rejected for lack of appetite. Lorenzo always remained close by, looking on, watching over a faraway sleep, punctured by starts and sorrows, keeping between his own hands an inert hand he was unable to warm up.