So the marriage took place. From now on, Lorenzo would have someone to look out for him. Marcela did not have what it would take to be anything more than what Catalina intended her to be. And if Marcela ever thought about her lot in life, she would understand that she had reason to be content with it. Or would she have preferred to have her family spit on her dishonor? Would she have been able to* endure the harsh weather on the mountainside, the shame of beggary in a town of Caxláns? Here she had a place of refuge for her destitution, a name to cover her head, the title of wife to confront others with.

“From Lorenzo no harm can come to her. Though if what Marcela wants is to have the satisfaction of a man . . . she will just have to control herself. She has to pay something for what she lacks.”

This reasoning dispelled Catalina’s last scruple. She had finished eating her portion of meat and she served herself another.

For weeks Marcela lived in frightened expectation, quivering like a hare. Then, imperceptibly, she began to grow accustomed to Lorenzo’s almost vegetable presence.

The pair held each other’s hands to go and cut wood, to go and herd the flock, to go to Jobel.

Not love but pity gradually filled Marcela’s heart to the brim with a deep and restful water. She drank from it when, with a delicate motion, she drew close to her husband to bring a bite of food to his lips, or when she wrapped him up warmly at bedtime so he would not be cold.

The days went along, one after the other. In mid-afternoon the two women sat under the hut’s palm-thatch eaves with the loom stretching out in front of them like a brief horizon. The threads were intertwined with precision, with artistry, and the work gradually began to appear in its perfection: soft to the touch, pleasant to the gaze, useful. At times a word flew between them. Catalina was the one who spoke it. Simply syllables, slight suggestions, the short string that keeps the bird tied down. Marcela would listen distractedly, acquiescing to the sound, only the sound.

Because a great peace—a peace with eyelids of sleep—had spread its balm over the girl’s joints in the place where memory was painful, in the place where hope would be painful. What throbs inside her is no longer a bloody entrail but a moment, the marvelous void of this moment.