Teresa was studying the intruder’s face but could find nothing there to orient herself by. Idolina added quickly, “My father’s portraits are in here.”

“You loved him very much?”

“No.”

The negation came out of Idolina with such spontaneity that she was unable to conceal it with evasions or lessen its brutality with explanations. What had uprooted Isidoro from his daughter’s heart? Bitterness; a sudden bitterness, an explosive disappointment. Idolina had experienced her father’s death as an affront, an unfulfilled pact, a broken oath. It was the first betrayal she endured.

She had never before been conscious of such feelings. But judging herself for them was not important to her; any act that would have struck her as reprehensible in another person became good if she were the one who carried it out, without any need to seek motives to justify it. This time, though, she had spoken out loud, exposed her naked intimacy to a stranger. She trembled as she awaited the verdict.

Julia stripped the moment of its gravity.

“I didn’t love my father either. He was a drunk.”

It wasn’t the vulgarity of what she confided but the casual and unconcerned way she did so that offended Idolina. She straightened herself and moved away from this unknown woman at whose mercy she had so unthinkingly placed herself.

The suspicion that she was walking on uncertain ground could not escape Julia’s quick intuition.

“You’ll have to get used to my ways,” she said. “We Mexicans are very frank. I have nothing to hide.”

It was a threat. But Julia immediately counterbalanced it.

“I only hide my friends’ secrets. And you’re my friend,” she repeated as she brushed the girl’s forehead lightly with her lips. “No one will hear from me that we have met. You keep quiet, too.”

And after lifting her index finger to her mouth as if to impose silence, she left. Her perfume, a female perfume, dense, real, took longer to fade away.

Teresa pleaded in anguish, “Let’s go, niña, let’s go before they come.”

Idolina looked impatiently at the nana.

“Julia Acevedo is my friend.”

Without heeding the other woman’s wailings, she went back to look down from the window. Not like the first time, when her attention was pure, wandering and dispersed. Now she was looking for something. She saw Julia, wrapped in a silk shawl, standing in the middle of the courtyard. She seemed to be waiting for someone. At her back, Leonardo’s footsteps declared his approach. Julia turned to him, her face lit up with a cynical and inviting smile.

Idolina couldn’t look any more. Her eyes were clouded over with tears.

IX

CHAPTER IX