Each unknotting (the appetites that demand their satisfaction, the kinsmen that complain of her coldness, or nothing more than the fatigue of incessant effort) was a sickness, a wrenching. So lengthy an agony, and without any resolution!

But the ilol accepted her fate, agreed to it, obedient. Hers was the destiny of water that fructifies the place it passes through. Until suddenly it plunges headlong into the void.

It is impossible to go back. Hopelessly she searched in Pedro’s presence for the love, the storminess, the anguish of former days. And in Domingo for the consolation of past times. One of them rejected her because he was shut up inside himself, the other thwarted her because he was happy. And neither the sight of Lorenzo nor her interaction with Marcela was capable now of reviving pity or disdain within her.

Catalina became sullen. Sullen even with the idols, which she would have wanted to damage, to break, as if the matter that sheathed them were the source of their muteness. The silence was not in the mouths of others but in Catalina’s own stopped-up ears and worn-out eardrums.

Inside her only one question reverberated: why did they abandon me? Her family, her people. No, they had not abandoned her because they were surfeited. Many times the ilol saw them leave unsatisfied, doubtful, unrelieved, despite her longing to give herself to them. And though she called to them and they returned, they stood there looking at her uselessly.

Had the wealth of her mines been exhausted or was Catalina an inept prospector? She felt it was her right to demand a respite. But the people, ever fickle, and now betraying her again, were already far away. And the cave of Tzajal-hemel was empty. And the idols were without sacrifices. And the ilol was abandoned.

Abandoned. As a sick person keeps returning to, touching, probing the point from which his pain radiates, Catalina returned to the feeling of her isolation, her uselessness. She wanted to arouse a hostility inside herself, but she experienced only a hazy dismay, without any fixed handhold. The evil was not sinking its roots into the others. It was sinking them into her.

Ah, how well she knew herself, how long she had endured herself. A childless woman. The nut that does not break open to make way for the growth and fullness of the seed. The rock, ugly and immobile, against which the passer-by stumbles. The fist that imprisons the bird and strangles its death rattle.

What had her mistaken tenacity done for her? Nothing belonged to her. Pedro was always someone else and not the man Catalina loved, the man Catalina needed. She could not hold him inside herself, not even as a child is held. A child. That was the name of her solitude, her destitution, her failure.