With greater precaution, as if to keep Teresa from noticing, the figure of Catalina Díaz Puiljá was also sometimes evoked; to her, according to Felipa, were owed all the household’s misfortunes. Rosendo tried to calm her by advising her to be prudent if she did not want those misfortunes to increase, now that Catalina had acquired such great power. But Felipa was not intimidated. All those tales of the appearance of some gods in a cave, she said, were no more than lies, the kind of cock-and-bull stories Catalina had always used to impose her will on others through terror. But what harm could Catalina do her now? She was not afraid of death, her own or that of those closest to her, she said, gazing malignantly at Rosendo. And he, who still wanted to live, who took pleasure in the drunkenness in which he felt important and respected, found no other way of silencing his wife’s irreverences but with a blow. He was able to lower the volume of her voice, but Felipa continued fuming at this cowardly man who had given up his daughter Marcela for nothing.

When, the day’s heavy labor done, Teresa lay down next to the half-extinguished fire, sleep took a long time to close her eyelids. The misery into which she had sunk made her remember the Cifuentes household with secret pride and a veiled feeling of superiority. The carpet in the sewing room, she said to herself, remembering the softness, the warmth in which her feet had so often delighted. Curled up into a ball to warm herself, Teresa murmured in Castilla the names of the things she felt nostalgic for: the flowerpots in the gallery, the knocker on the main entryway, the flagstones where she washed the clothes, the cot she slept on. She never murmured Idolina’s name.

Because when one loses a child (ay, she would rather a thousand times have seen her dead than in the hands of an intruder, a thief like that Julia Acevedo) one cannot speak. On the beast’s back fall the blows of a master who is feared, who is not understood. And the beast is bewildered and suffers and runs to escape, and it is chased and caught and can be punished once more. And the beast does not complain because it does not understand.

As the weeks passed Teresa began to discover within herself an emptiness that was not filled by pleasant memories of the past or the exhausting work of the present. Even if she were to say something—and what could she say to this Rosendo always unconscious from alcohol, this Felipa, bitter and whining—even the smallest and most insignificant word seemed like a waste. Because it was not heard by Idolina.