Idolina, her grandparents predicted, will be just like Isidoro. She quickly gave everyone reason to believe the prophecy would come true. When she celebrated her first birthday she was showered with toys, gifts, parties. They thought they were making her happy. But the excitement of seeing so many unfamiliar faces around her, of receiving so many new things, was so great that she came down with a very high fever and spent all night in a delirium. Afterward, that peculiar, morbid way of folding in on herself each time a situation seemed not even hostile but simply out of the ordinary, became a habit. Timid, insecure, the little girl never let go of Isidoro’s hand. And when Isidoro had to be away from the house, Idolina would curl up anywhere that a piece of clothing, an open book, a half-written sheet of paper would speak to her of her absent father. She would curl up and weep like an abandoned puppy.

She won’t be able to bear the pain, Isabel said to herself when they laid out Isidoro’s body in the parlor. She tried to hide the sight from Idolina. But the child’s curiosity outwitted all of the adults’ precautions and Idolina witnessed every detail of the funeral. Without a tear. With the same frown of resolute attention she had on her face when she practiced a difficult scale on the piano.

To the others, to Isabel especially, this attitude seemed very strange. It’s because she doesn’t understand what has happened, they decided. They forgot that Idolina had a very precocious understanding of absence. And now that the absence was definitive, she was never heard to ask why or to mourn it. She didn’t protest when all the dead man’s personal effects were given to the poor. For months she checked carefully on the mourning crepe that overshadowed her father’s portrait.

Idolina turned to Isabel with a raw, demanding attachment that couldn’t have been satisfied, even by absorbing the totality of Isabel’s life. From that moment on, Isabel could not take a single step without her daughter following in her shadow. She lost all patience with this relentless tenacity; with scornful gestures, with mockery, she succeeded in pushing her daughter away.

Isabel’s new marriage changed Idolina profoundly. For weeks she refused to eat anything. She grew skeletally thin. Each time she looked at herself in her wardrobe mirror, her eyes were glazed over with a malevolent happiness. Isabel had to give in, lower herself to pleading, serving each mouthful with her own hands. Idolina refused them all, stubborn in her will to let herself waste away.

Leonardo, who had little use for hysterical women, derided the two of them. It was the first crack in his union with Isabel. What was more, when he wasn’t excessively absorbed in his work, he used the free time for uncouth diversions, with the lowest kind of people in Ciudad Real.