And suddenly everything had been transformed. The artisan no longer opened the door of the workshop where his labor ground him down without any compensation. Now he walked past the loom, past the leatherworking tools, past the anvil without giving them so much as a glance. He went to his back storage room and took out a rusty shotgun, an antique rifle, a pistol he had made with his own hands. He asked for some oil and a piece of chamois and sat down on the edge of a bed to rub the weapon’s interstices patiently until the last vestige of the rust that had marred the metal was erased. His children did not dare approach this man, absorbed, for the first time in their memory, in an important task, and on the sly they imitated his movements with toy weapons. Their mother shooed them away noiselessly. Then she went to the kitchen to make a little coffee to cheer her husband up with.

At noon the church bells rang. It was the call to prayer, which each person usually said to himself. But today pedestrians knelt down in the middle of the street and joined hands to recite aloud the verses of the Annunciation.

The upheaval was more apparent in the center of town. The maids came and went, barefoot, catlike, quick, buying out the stock of stores and markets, accompanying the patrona to the hiding place used in situations like this, cleaning out the cistern in case anyone had to take refuge there.

There was something almost festive about these preparations. But it was a funereal festival. The great mourning cast over Ciudad Real by the death of Padre Mandujano and his escorts had erased the small particular mournings many families were dragging out, no longer remembering for whom.

Spinsters opened the doors that shut them in. Now, finally, they could move around, act, serve, without being paralyzed by mockery or disapproval. For the first time in years they saw the street, no longer through a windowpane or from behind a half-closed shutter, but in full daylight. They joined the groups naturally, without giving rise to comments or sympathetic sighs. Who was going to notice them now? Who was going to see their sterile bellies, their barren years? Who was going to count their wrinkles and white hairs? Who was going to negate their efforts to feel that there was still hope for them, that they still were not definitively excluded from the circle of other people’s interests and work? They talked a lot, heatedly, and laughed noisily. They offered to help and used this unexpected respite as an outlet for their abnegation.

At an early hour, the married women left the bed of love and childbirth, the place where the man humiliated and exalted them, the throne of their idleness, their refuge against inclement weather, and vigorously grasped the reins of the household which they so frequently abandoned to the servants.