How beautiful this landscape looked, seen through her transparency. The men returned along the paths of twilight, with the hoe or the staff of office in hand, depending on whether they had been at the cornfield or the Cabildo. Xaw Ramírez Paciencia, the sacristan, tolled the bronze churchbells. Smoke rose from the huts, the timid, hesitant smoke given off by the cooking fires of the poor. Here, there, like the eyes of a fugitive animal, tiny lights flickered. Then night held absolute sway.

But it is essential to be vigilant, not to sleep. Something is always lurking. Catalina was the first to become aware of it. People swear that an ilol needs only to examine a female’s footprints in order to tell the number of months of her heaviness. She needs even less when envy sharpens her senses and makes them perceive what is beyond the footprints, beyond what the purple circles under the eyes hold back, what the forehead, cloudy as a mirror, conceals.

Catalina knew but kept silent. She was speechless with what is most painful, most true: hunger. The hunger that makes us twist and moan, that becomes intolerable when we behold the fullness of others.

The ilol spied on Marcela with wide, delirious eyes. How was it possible that this insignificant, stupid girl whom she used as a simple instrument of her designs had succeeded in becoming the repository of the treasure that was denied to Catalina? And what was even more absurd: Marcela was unconscious of her privilege. She continued carrying out her duties, indifferently, routinely; she continued in her daily comings and goings, a little slower now, only a little slower.

Rather than placating Catalina’s jealousy, this unconcern only excited it. Ignorance is sometimes too close to mockery, and passivity can be confused with provocation and insult. Exasperated, Catalina shouted (and it was as if someone were lancing an abscess on her body), “You are going to have a child!”

The revelation shook Marcela. Instinctively she raised both hands to her belly as if to stop the thing that was growing within her, implacable, hour by hour, more and more, and that would end by devouring her. She began to feel it: that thing was moving, kicking, suffocating. A spasm of nausea, her last gesture of defense, doubled her over. An uncontrollable longing to tear out the gelatinous mass that was patiently nourishing itself by gnawing at her entrails, a desire to destroy the formless creature that was already crushing her down with a master’s heavy foot.