Then he saw the man. That is, from high on his horse, the gesticulating shadow bursting out of a house, running crabwise towards them along the road; Georges remembering having first been struck by the shadow because, he said, it was stretched out flat, while Iglésia and he saw the man from above, foreshortened, so that he was still staring at the shadow (like an inkblot that slid along the road without leaving a trace, as though on an oilcloth or some vitrified matter) incomprehensibly waving its two claws while the voice reached him from another point, the movements and the voice apparently separated, dissociated, until he raised his head, discovered the face raised towards them, stamped with a kind of bewilderment, a furious and suppliant exaltation, Georges only then managing to understand what the voice was screaming (that is, what it had screamed, for it was already screaming something else, so that when he answered it was with a lag, as if what the other man was screaming took a moment to reach him, to penetrate the depths of his fatigue), hearing his own voice come out (or rather expelled with effort) hoarse, uneven and screaming too, as if they all had to shout to manage to make themselves heard although they were only a few yards (and then not even that) from each other and there was no other noise then save for a distant cannonade (because probably the man had begun screaming as soon as he had seen them, screaming while he ran down the front steps of the house, still screaming without realizing that it was less and less necessary the closer he came to them, his thinking that he had to scream probably explained too by the fact that he didn’t stop running, even when he stood motionless for a second beneath Georges, pointing at the place where the sniper was concealed, still running probably in his mind, not even realizing that he had stopped, so that it was probably impossible for him to express himself except by screaming, the way a man does when he’s running) and Georges screaming too then: “Nurses? No. Why nurses? Do we look like nurses? Do we have armban . . .” the furious dialogue exchanged at the top of their lungs on the sunny, empty road (except, on each side, that double streak of rubbish, of wrecks, as if some flood, some unleashed stream, inundating and immediately drying up, had passed along here, rejecting, leaving on its slopes these confused, filthy and motionless heaps—things, animals, dead men—quivering slightly in the layer of warm air that vibrated just above the ground in the May sunshine), between the cavalryman on his motionless horse and the man running, screaming again: “Bandages . . . You’ve got to . . . There are two men who’ve just been shot. You don’t have, you aren’t . . .” and Georges: “Bandages? Good God, where do you . . .” and the man beginning to turn round to start back towards the house, now slowing down, screaming again, in a kind of desperate rage: “Then what the hell are you doing there on your horses in the middle of the road Don’t you know they’re firing at anything that goes by?” and waving his arms again, turning round but still running, pointing at something, screaming: “There’s one over there, just behind the corner of that brick house!” and Georges: “Where?” and the man already moving, starting back, turning round, screaming furiously: “Good God . . . the brick house over there!” and Georges: “But they’re all brick,” and the man: “Damn fool!” and Georges: “But he didn’t shoot,” and the man (farther away now, running, his face turned towards them to answer, so that his whole body is twisted like a corkscrew, the head looking the opposite way from the direction he is running, his body—that is, the plane of his chest—in the axis of his trajectory and his hips (the plane of his hips) oblique in relation to the latter, so that he is running crosswise, again, rather like a crab, seeming to drag his feet after him clumsily, his legs threatening to get tangled at any moment, while his outspread arms continue to gesticulate) screaming: “Damn fool! He won’t shoot at you from over there. He’s waiting until you’re close and then he’ll shoot!” and Georges: “But where . . .” and the man over his shoulder: “Damn fool!” and Georges shouting: “But Good God where’s the front, where . . .” and the man stopping this time, puzzled for a second, outraged, standing there, his arms outstretched, screaming with rage now: “The front? Damn fool! The front? . . . There is no more front, you fool, there’s nothing left!” and Georges (his voice raised now because the other man has turned his back, started running again, and has almost reached the steps of the house he had come out of and would disappear into): “But what shall we do? What can we do? Where can we . . .” and the man: “Do what I did!” his arms falling, his wrists turned in so that his fingers pointing towards himself seem to invite the two cavalrymen to examine his clothes, screaming: “Get out of those! Get into civilian clothes! Look for some clothes in some house and lie low. Lie low!”, raising his arms again and suddenly lowering them towards them in the gesture of pushing them away, warding them off, cursing them, and disappearing inside the house, and now nothing again except Georges and Iglésia perched on their horses in the middle of the sunny road bordered here and there with houses and absolutely deserted except for the dead animals, the dead men, the enigmatic and motionless heaps in the distance, slowly beginning to rot in the sun, and Georges looking at the corner of the brick house, then the house where the man has just disappeared, then again the mysterious corner of the house, then hearing hoof beats behind him, turning back, Iglésia already trotting, the extra horse trotting beside him, the two horses turning down a side road, this time to the left, and Georges spurring his horse to a trot too, catching up with Iglésia, saying: “Where are you going?” and Iglésia, without looking at him, snorting, his expression still sulky, resentful: “To do what he said. Look for some clothes and lie low,” and Georges: “Lie low where? And then what?” and Iglésia not answering, and a moment later the horses tethered in an empty stable and Iglésia furiously knocking his rifle butt against the door until Georges merely turns the handle, the door opening by itself, and then walls, darkness around them, in other words an enclosed, finite space (not that they hadn’t learnt enough in a week to know the worth, the solidity of walls and the trust they could put in them, that is, about as much as a soap bubble—with this difference that once it bursts nothing is left of the soap bubble but the imperceptible droplets instead of an inextricable, greyish, dusty and deadly mass of bricks and beams: but it didn’t matter, that wasn’t it, the point was not to be outside now, to have four walls around them and a roof over their heads), and this: four urine-yellow rods of imitation bamboo, their bevelled ends sticking out beyond the corners of the mirror whose four sides framed a face he had never seen, wan, the features haggard, the eyes red-rimmed and the cheeks covered with an eight days’ beard, then he thought: “But that’s me,” standing there looking at that stranger’s face, frozen where he stood not by surprise or interest but merely by fatigue, leaning so to speak against his own image, standing stiff in his stiff clothes (remembering that scornful slang expression he had heard one day: “You’re only standing up because your pants are starched”), holding his rifle by the barrel, the butt on the floor, his arm dangling slightly, as though he were holding something he was dragging behind him, for instance a leash from which some practical joker had removed the dog, or the way a drunkard holds an empty bottle while he leans his forehead against a plate-glass window, hoping to find a little coolness, hearing Iglésia behind him opening the wardrobe and rummaging through it, throwing the men’s and women’s clothes on the floor, then his face vanished and the mirror with it, the rectangle in front of his eyes now that of the door framing an emaciated man with a yellow death’s head and a mole the size of a pea on his right cheek, near the corner of his mouth.