“Don’t worry about it. I’ll give her the message.”

“Thank you very much.”

That last phrase sounded like a dismissal. Before going their separate ways, the pair of them looked at one another, each offended by the other’s blindness and lack of love. And they each promised themselves that the final goodbye would at least leave their pride intact.

XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVI

CATALINA DÍAZ PUILJÄ was shivering. In vain she had covered her body with the rags that her finest and her everyday clothes had been worn to over the course of this demented, delirious march that had begun with Domingo’s death.

Domingo’s death. Now, at a distance, Catalina could contemplate it with a lucidity that made it totally incomprehensible. The lone boy, placed in the center of an inviolate circle; his spilled blood, drunk by ravenous dogs as well as by those who witnessed the sacrifice and those who consummated it. Catalina beat at her temples to make herself remember what spot she was standing in while Domingo was dying. Distracted, absorbed, frenetic, yes, but where? If only she could know that she would know all the rest, too.

But it was not possible. The sepulchral slab that did not quite cover the corpse of the boy, her boy, had been covering her ever since. Under it, immobile, lay the ilol whose powers had been lost. The woman who made the marvelous discovery in the cave had forgotten it; the woman who, with her own hands, gave shape to some distant and perhaps already nonexistent idols; the woman who, in her barrenness, rejoiced in the proximity of a childhood. And that was the part of Catalina that was most dead, most buried, most rotted away.

The woman who survived Good Friday was someone else, with a perpetual shudder that made her jaws lock and erased every trace of color from her face. Her only solace lay in not having to decide anything ever again.

She set out walking at a sign from those who led the tribe and in the direction her shepherds indicated. She stopped when the others did: when the difficulties of the path impeded the march; when some enemy waylaid them; when night fell.

Sometimes, in a moment of repose, Catalina saw—in the shape of a crag, in the mirroring surface of a body of water, in a fugitive cloud—the image of a crucified boy. She saw it and the words that would have given this mirage the name that would conjure it away did not rise to her lips.

What was more, whether she herself or anyone else spoke words, she did not hear them, deafened as she was by the pandemonium of fury that burst her eardrums after Domingo’s death.