At the announced time, the music began to play. The marimba’s low, opaque tones scattered out into the air and were multiplied, making everything throb with a deep, sweet nostalgia, a vague presentiment of plenitude and good fortune, a remote, chaste sensuality.

The emotions summoned up and made present by the music rose like a wave out of Idolina’s heart and disturbed it. Agitated, she watched the couples sliding gracefully across the waxed dance floor. Idolina would have wanted to be one of the girls who were dancing. That one, waiting for her companion’s words with such modest expectation. This one, who settled her hand on the sleeve of an evening jacket with an assured gesture of possession and control. The one over there, who shook her head with the same rebellious gesture as a colt rejecting the bridle. No one was excluded from Idolina’s eagerness to be. Not even the one who was waiting, anxiously trembling on the edge of her seat, for someone to ask her to dance. Or the one who responded to the courteous request of an obese married man with a disillusioned smile, or the one who, abandoned by her more fortunate companions and wishing to conceal her disappointment, pretended to entertain herself by counting the floor tiles. Or the one who, constrained by her allegiance to the rules of a certain religious society or by her fiancé’s absence or prevented by her parents or by the tradition that deprives all married women of the right to participate in any youthful diversion, remained at the margins and watched the others dancing, eyes big with envy.

Idolina’s soul, ordinarily so uninhabited, was now overflowing with the reality these other women conferred on it. A gesture, a set of features, gave her enough material to invent a personality, to imagine a situation in which she was the center.

The squeaking of the door’s rusty hinges brought Idolina out of her trance. Startled, she turned toward the noise. There, outlined against the light from outside, was the silhouette of a woman in an evening gown. Teresa choked back a moan of terror.

“Who is there?” an imperious voice demanded.

With the audacity of one who, having lost everything already, no longer has anything to risk, Idolina tried to slip by the woman and out the door. But in the darkness she ran into another body. A pair of hands around her waist stopped her. She tried to free herself; there was a quick struggle, but her opponent’s dexterity and strength won out and Idolina fell to the floor.

Motionless, Teresa observed this episode from a corner. She was about to take a step toward the girl when she saw that the intruder was leaning over her.