Pedro reproached her bitterly for wandering off like that. But as Catalina listened, head hanging and lips motionless, her husband watched for the sign that would come to give shape to his suspicion that the gods had not died, that their veneration would be resumed and that the Chamula people had not been cheated once more.

It was impossible for Catalina to offer anything, not even to herself; she followed false trails within herself like a hungry beast of prey.

After that she went back to the cave once more, many times more. She would stay there, in the darkness, breathing the unhealthy air that peopled her senses with deliria. She stretched out face down on the ground, the same ground that the crowd had trampled in happier days, and she felt herself die. She made her hands go limp, releasing all the intentions she was clinging to; she chased all memories from her mind; she silenced her heart, erasing the wound of love, the bite of jealousy, the purulence of contempt. She left herself empty in order to make room for revelation.

And nothing happened. Not a glimpse, not a disclosure. The ilol returned to her opaque routine as impoverished and despairing as before.

Nevertheless, something was gestating. Neither her heart nor her head noticed it. It was her hands, blinder and more humble, but more obedient, that began to seek out, by touch, a material in which to palpate the form they had already foreseen.

How to make present once more the vanished image of the idols? Each hour, each day was spent fulfilling her task of striking out a trait of that face, altering an expression, blending in an attribute. Anxious to hold back this current, Catalina buried her hands in the clay where the tip of her finger was imprinting an image dictated by an imprecise, contradictory, unreliable memory.

The failure of her attempts made her furious with her work. Again and again she broke the grotesque figures she was modelling. Again and again she discarded almost formless chunks of clay. And she always breathed deeply in relief, as if she had moved aside an impediment and now the way was clearer, easier to proceed along.

The fever, the fever of the days of plenitude, came back to take possession of her. But it no longer beat against her like an enclosed wind; it bolstered her in her effort, illuminated her in her conception, sustained her in her dissatisfaction. And it was not repose that Catalina found when, at last, the work of her hands corresponded—however imperfectly—to the demands of her memory. It was not repose but a frenzy, the heaving of the female who is about to ¡give birth.