After that everything was so strange. . . . Two weeks after the wedding, when they had settled down on one of his father’s fincas, Isidoro locked himself in his room and refused to speak to his newlywed bride. Her eyes overcast with weeping, Isabel, leaning on the balustrade in the gallery, watched Leonardo galloping through the paddocks. And she wished she could run to him out there and beg him to save her from so unhappy a fate.

Isabel still recalled the period of her pregnancy with nostalgia. Months during which her body, which had now reached its plenitude, swelled with an elemental sensuality that existed not in acts but in an enormous repose. The slow swaying of the rocking chair, the siestas on the sun porch, her hair falling loosely through the hands of the Indian woman who combed and combed it with a tortoiseshell comb.

Idolina was born there, on the ranch. Around the time she was due, Isidoro claimed an urgent and unpostponable need to make a trip to Ciudad Real. Business, he said. But Isabel, who had deciphered his character by then, knew it was a pretext. What Isidoro wanted was to run away from the pain his wife would have to endure. With the same repulsion, he withdrew from the corrals every time a calf was about to be branded or a steer was being treated for worms with creosote. Isabel watched him leave with a smile of contempt. Even the considerate gestures Isidoro sometimes bestowed on her couldn’t be credited to the meticulousness of his courtesy or the depth of his affection. He was a weak man; that explained everything. And women like Isabel do not forgive weakness. They value as a sign of manliness the whip the male uses to force the female to yield; they store the memory of their humiliations among the relics of love.

“Leonardo, now, he wouldn’t have to do any soul-searching before he dragged by the hair a female who resisted him or acted headstrong or surly or capricious.”

Leonardo, in Isabel’s dreams, in the interminable wanderings of her mind during the interminable forty days that followed her labor. Rain blanketed the windowpanes. And there, next to the mother, tiny, wrinkled, red and shivering with cold, was the daughter.