God had manifested his displeasure with this marriage by not granting it any offspring. There was only Idolina, the stepdaughter, whom Isabel coddled in secret so Leonardo wouldn’t say she was still demonstrating her love for Isidoro.

Isabel tiptoed around as cautiously as a new bride. Because no matter how many years they had spent together (she always got tangled up whenever she tried to count), Leonardo remained an enigma to her. Never, not even when passion bound them together in its blind knot, did they belong to each other deeply. And the great thirst he aroused in her was never sated.

The demon abandons those he seduces, His Excellency Don Alfonso .would declare, trying, as her confessor, to dissuade Isabel from making an unsuitable alliance. She confessed to the bishop the first movements of her soul toward the temptation to commit adultery that Leonardo represented. She spoke vaguely, without being very exact—how could she be more exact?—about the vertiginous intensity with which evil thoughts were overwhelming her. (She appeased her scruples by telling herself that priests know they are obliged to fill in with their malice what we leave out with ours.)

The evil thoughts—if only I were free!—were so obsessive that at times Isabel found herself looking around as if the clamor of the words had made itself heard outside of her brain and was giving her away. Then, when they brought Isidoro’s corpse. . . .

It was the first time Isabel had stood in the presence of death. But it wasn’t as horrible or as solemn as she had feared. Isidoro’s face had an expression of tranquility, repose, saintliness. The bullet hadn’t disfigured him. An almost imperceptible hole in the middle of the chest; a small round stain of his blood. And another, the same size and shape, on the palm of his right hand. From the gesture he made when he felt the wound.

Perhaps people began suspecting it was a crime from that moment. Isabel didn’t know. No one around her was close enough to her to dare repeat such rumors to her. But in the confessional, His Excellency Don Alfonso was prying: “You’re sure you didn’t lead Leonardo on with sinful promises?”

“No, Monseñor. No, Monseñor.” Isabel could deny it wholeheartedly because the two of them had never once exchanged a word that needed to be concealed. Between them was silence, a palpitating, magnetic, portentous silence, a terrible inevitability. Anguish. An anguish Isabel would not have exchanged for the most absolute happiness.

That Lent the bishop’s sermons all dwelled on finalities: death, judgment, hell. He described them with images so vivid, features so appalling, that the worshippers, wringing their hands in fear, cried out the error of their ways for all the world to hear and demanded absolution, weeping. Only Isabel, sunk down on her prie-dieu, ran through her rosary beads with distracted fingers.