Pedro’s temples pounded against the hard wood. A feeling of imminence was vibrating in the tips of his fingers; it. ran through his veins, igniting them, electrifying him. For the first time, his life presented itself to him as a river of continuous events flowing through a channel that brought him to this place, to this precise moment. The influence he had over those of his race, his political position, even the fact that he was the last of his lineage (because it made him more solitary, because it left him freer to accept and fulfill ambitious destinies), everything would take on meaning, find an explanation, reach its culmination, if only Pedro were capable of responding to the challenge thrown down by injustice which, in coming to provoke him, did not stop even at the threshold of his own house.

How was he to fight? Against whom? Pedro’s mind burned with sudden, vengeful flames. He saw the Caxlán impaled; he saw fire running through the streets of Jobel; he saw the Ladino throng bent low beneath slavery’s whip. Winiktón pounced on these images like a ravenous beast on a slab of meat. Then he pulled away, not sated but in disappointment. No, it was not so easy to deceive him. He already knew, he had seen it too many times: injustice grows greater with vengeance.

“It is impossible to do anything,” he said in discouragement.

And his life escaped from him, like water when there is nothing but a net to carry it in.

Carefully, so as not to awaken Catalina, Pedro moved. Now that the defeat was complete, he wanted only to flee. He could not bear the slow nightly vigil of familiar objects, lightless stars, whose center of gravity he was. Silently he reached the door. The midnight wind lashed his cheek.

Catalina did not notice that she was left alone. She was dreaming. Dreaming that she was conversing with water. Dialogue is difficult when the other has a distant face, fugitive eyes, a vagabond attention, hardly hearing a word when the word has already been forgotten, along with the person who spoke it. However, Catalina knew a great deal about patience. She sat down on the bank, to wait. Until the water answered. It solidified into crystals and through the crystals could be seen, first vaguely, then distinctly, a set of human features. The smooth forehead, stony and unresonating, the eyes from which meekness peered, the random laugh: Lorenzo Díaz Puiljá, her brother, the innocent.

IV

CHAPTER IV