She watched other people’s gestures without understanding them either. One man would hoist a machete or a hoe; another would be brandishing some rocks. In front of him went Pedro González Winiktón, his eyes fixed on no one knew what. At his sides the Ladinos: Ulloa and Santiago.

In the confusion and disorder of the exodus no one saw to anyone but himself. What happened to Lorenzo Díaz Puiljá, Catalina’s brother, the innocent? Those who Were questioned could not say. He was with them at the beginning, they were sure; Marcela helped him with his needs. But he gradually began to lag behind; he was always slower than the others and gave in more easily to fatigue. Or he died in some combat. Or he simply decided to go back to his hut.

The others went on, up and down hills, protecting themselves from the rain under the trees’ foliage or in a sheepfold. They descended on the settlements, starving, blind with rage, seeking, almost groping for an end to their exhaustion. Then they would go, leaving behind them a smoking ruin, a field laid to waste, some animal or human remains.

They would walk away, looking at each other suspiciously, trying to hide what they had managed to steal.

Catalina, to whom no one paid any particular deference, plundered the granaries and nosed around the hooks where meat is hung out of reach to be smoked and dried. She wanted to eat, always, at all times. She finished off the stew abandoned in the kitchen by those who had taken flight; she went to the storerooms and ripped open bags of grain that she chewed long and painfully and then was unable to swallow. She threw stones to knock down clusters of fruit, and she sucked on her fingers which were impregnated with a juice long since consumed, an absent aroma.

Catalina’s agility as she scurried from place to place, driven by obscure instincts, by dire needs, was astonishing to Marcela who had once known her wearied by her priestess’s robes, marked by a hieratic reserve as if she feared her every movement could unleash a catastrophe. But Marcela had stopped trying to understand Catalina from the very beginning. For many years, she had submitted to her like an ox allowing itself to be yoked to the instrument of labor. But now something had cracked, and the figure of the ilol, once respected, feared, venerated, was collapsing at her feet. Marcela turned her face away so as not to see it. Without anger, without amazement, without disillusionment, without happiness. At last she was free.

And Catalina was, too. She joined with the other women to carry out the lowliest tasks. She merged with them. No sign of exemption set her apart, not even the mark, arbitrary and terrible, which all of them glimpsed, though she hid it as if it were leprosy.