Reputation. You must make the sign of the cross over your mouth so your guardian angel will keep you from committing the crime—because it is a crime—of wounding the reputation of your fellow men, inventing slanders, propagating rumors.

But conversation would be so insipid without the grain of salt such whisperings add!

Gently, slowly, delicately the whited sepulchers are disturbed and the fetid odor of secrets that cannot be silenced because they cry out to heaven escapes. Of injustice, pain, misery.

They cannot be silenced. Because if the things that are hidden beneath the rooftops, beneath the sheets, were silenced they would rot until they polluted the entire world.

Talking is like lancing an abscess. The pus runs out; the swelling goes down; the fever and its delirium are calmed.

Julia witnessed this operation, mesmerized by disgust and curiosity. It was then that she confronted for the first time a true image of Ciudad Real.

All the prestige of those to whom she paid the tribute of her admiration, respect, and envy, was dissected in her presence. Under the ecclesiastical vestments, under the academic gowns of the professionals, writhed diseased entrails, twisted minds, inconsolable disgraces.

In the rear courtyard of a house whose front door ostentatiously displays aristocratic coats of arms and proofs of lineage is locked, thrashing around in his own excrement, the madman, who has attacks of fury on certain nights and breaks the bars of his cage and howls like a wounded animal.

In a windowless room lies a baby whose bones never hardened enough for it to stand up. Toothless, centuries old, an enormous, hollow head sways on a pile of large pillows.

There are families everyone shuns because the cry of a newborn child was heard unexpectedly, a wailing silenced without an echo, without an epitaph.

And how has he come up in the world so suddenly, the scavenger who lived on the outskirts of the city and now parades around the center insulting others with his insolent luxuries and dissipated ways? Did he dig up a treasure, as the stories say? Is it true that, night after a night, a lost soul appeared to him to show him the exact place where he should dig? The money was intended for masses and ceremonies that would rescue a dead man from the flames of purgatory. And it is being wasted without rhyme or reason on frivolities.

No, you shouldn’t play tricks on the dead. It would have been better for him to have taken away a widow’s ranch or all that an orphan had, as so many others have done. It would even have been better for him to have appropriated the goods of the clergy, betraying their trust by transforming himself from nominal depository to legitimate owner.