Catalina wants to expiate the guilt. She humbles herself before her husband, then raises herself up, maddened with wounded pride; she serves Lorenzo but disdains him for his feebleness. She tolerates her sister-in-law, but only when jealousy does not rise into her mouth like a bitter foam.

Only with Domingo did she sometimes take sustenance and learn to find some rest. Domingo, who was warmed against her body when he was a newborn, who received food from her hands, and care and the little favors that make life possible.

Who but Catalina had surprised the first flash of intelligence in the little boy’s eyes? To whom did he stretch out his arms for the first time, to be picked up and held? What name did he learn to babble before any other?

In those years, Catalina wore her love for Domingo like a resplendent jewel upon her breast. After that she passed through a vast and hostile desert until the absolute appeared and made her its shelter and its dominion.

But the absolute is jealous. One by one it was casting away the memories that the notches in the surface of everyday life preserve; it was weakening the habits that ease the day’s work; it was erasing all faithfulness to others, to herself.

Catalina evaded even Pedro’s gaze; she allowed Lorenzo to become covered in lice and Marcela to be careless in her tasks. Even Domingo became a stranger to her, and she saw his face from very far away, as if through a mist, as if from another world.

Now Catalina is like an animal marked by a glowing brand: the brand of the gods. Before her lies the great stupefaction of the unknown. Behind her, the mass of her people. The people who pray, who implore, who may threaten. Words, murmurings, confessions. And suddenly everything disintegrates, sinks into silence.

Silence is the ravenous mouth of the abyss. It must be placated by flinging the only thing that will satiate its hunger into its depths: a victim.

Catalina is a tree that has been shaken, a coffer that has been ransacked. She no longer has anything to give. And the silence persists. Nothing to give. Because she defends the last thing that she possesses, and her nakedness is not perfect like the Cross’s.

The Cross cries out for its crucifixion. One by one, to all of them. But who has taken upon himself the duties of the tribe? Who has laid claim to the office of intermediary? No one but Catalina. And therefore the echo of the Cross’s clamoring is magnified in her, and into her flank digs the spur that demands action.

Drunken, terrible, innocent, Catalina lets out a scream. The silence, at last, is broken. She and that which raises up her head and supports her advance together amid the trampled pine needles and scattered debris and expectant people, to the Cross.