It would have been natural for Isabel to see to all the details, from making sure that the hired hands neatened up the garden to ordering the maids to shine the doorknockers. But Doña Mercedes had to take charge of everything because Isabel came and went, completely aloof from the preparations for an event she had opposed from the beginning. When she had to admit to herself that Leonardo had crossed wills with her, Isabel, too proud to lower herself to reproaching him, retreated into total silence. She shut herself up in her sewing room, bent over her embroidery frame. Not even curiosity could make her lift her eyes each time a parlor maid hurried through the room to carry out another of Doña Mercedes’ instructions.

But maintaining this stance demanded an effort that Isabel lacked the energy for. With every breath she choked back a sob of impotent rage, a howl of trampled dignity. To escape the questions of outsiders, Isabel isolated herself, avoiding even her daughter. Alone, she gave free rein to her wrath in fevered, sterile rantings that led her only to extreme resolutions that were impossibly violent. Because Isabel, despite the momentary rebelliousness her fury aroused in her, was by temperament and conviction a submissive spirit whose habit was resignation, whose vice was forgiveness.

Leonardo, however, was a man whose enterprising nature had been marked only slightly by the prejudices of a class he had acceded to by adoption. His status as a parvenu gave him a critical perspective. Every time his desires conflicted with the norms that society proclaimed untouchable, Leonardo ignored society and satisfied his desires. Thanks to this, Cifuentes considered himself, at the age of forty-three, a fortunate man. And crafty, too, he would add, with a roguish wink. Because craftiness gives me what luck denies me.

At times his cunning maneuvers had gone so far, according to people of ill will, as to constitute actual crimes. But—his good luck again—no one dared accuse him of anything. And the suspicions gave him an ambiguous aura of rakishness that kept the men he frequented in check and made the women he pursued give in to him.

Little by little, this conjunction of circumstances strengthened Leonardo’s certainty that his power was incontestable and his whims legitimate, a certainty he accepted unquestioningly and imposed on others without a second thought. No religious dread, no moral idea, no intellectual reflection argued against his impulses once they had started on their blind, headlong plunge. Yet Cifuentes was capable of supposing, in the crude naivete of his egotism, that those he trampled underfoot wouldn’t turn against him in hostility, but gaze at him with gratitude.

Surprise, therefore, was his first reaction to the lack of interest with which his wife witnessed the accomplishment of a project into which Leonardo had put so much enthusiasm. When he approached Isabel on the morning of the dance, his mood was not conciliatory but sarcastic.