“Because,” he said, “they couldn’t care less about all the rest . . .” (he was sitting on the edge of his cot too, his legs dangling, head down, completely absorbed by one of those mysterious and minute tasks that apparently seemed as necessary to his hands as food to a stomach, supporting them in time of need when he had, as now, no bridle to saddle-soap or no stirrup to polish (Georges vainly trying to remember a single occasion when he had seen him idle, that is without rubbing one of those harness accessories or a boot or something of the kind), and now it was a thread and a needle and a button he was carefully sewing onto his jacket in the middle of that slovenly and tattered group where the last of their problems was a missing button or a ripped seam, and saying, still bent over his work:) “. . .Because you’ve never seen someone who plays the races think he’s lost his money just because of bad luck or because he chose a bad horse, instead of supposing he’s been robbed by a trick . . .” (Georges realizing then that he was still staring at the same fraction of an inch of butt, or rather of twisted yellowed paper, and then shaking his head like someone who has just fallen asleep, at the same time that his ears suddenly filled again (as if he had suddenly pulled his hands away from them) with the foul and cacophonous racket of the barracks, and finally resigning himself to throwing away what certainly could not even give the illusion of a butt any longer, and saying: “Lucky for you she liked horse racing too. Otherwise one of those butcher boys would have eventually managed to hit as hard as he wanted, wouldn’t he?” Iglésia turning his face towards him then, but without raising his head, glancing out of the corner of his eyes with that same expression of baffled, outraged perplexity still on his face (not suspicious or hostile: merely perplexed, morose), then looking away, sniffling, examining the button he had sewn back on, pulling at it, then patting the jacket with the flat of his hand while he folded it up, saying: “Yeah, Probably. A still better chance if all she had wanted to do was watch them run . . .” then folding his jacket twice, carefully rolling it up, using it as a pillow, taking off his shoes, setting them down against the edge of his cot, pivoting on his buttocks and stretching out, saying as he pulled his coat over him: “If those bastards only stopped their racket for a while we could get some sleep!”, turning over onto his side then, pulling up his knees and closing his eyes, his yellow face expressionless, completely blank then, as if it were made of paper, some lifeless, dead material, and probably by virtue of the faculty he possessed of not thinking (or of not talking) more than was strictly necessary, and when he had made up his mind to sleep (probably deciding that the best thing to do on an empty stomach once the chores of maintenance—buttons, mending, cleaning—were finished was to sleep) no longer thinking at all; his ruffian’s face completely neutral, absent, like one of those mortuary Aztec or Inca masks set motionless, impenetrable and empty on the surface of time, that is to say that kind of glue, of greyness without dimensions in which they were sleeping, waking, moving, falling asleep and waking again without, from one day to the next, any variation whatever to make them think it was the next day and not the day before or even the same day so that it wasn’t day after day but somehow from place to place (like the surface of a painting darkened by varnish and filth and that a restorer might reveal in sections—testing, experimenting here and there on different areas with different cleaning solutions) that Georges and Blum gradually reconstituted, piece by piece or more accurately onomatopoeia by onomatopoeia wrung one by one by ruse and guile (the strategy consisting of forcing his tongue in some way, that is by advancing all kinds of hints or suppositions until he made up his mind to emit a sullen grumble, negative or resigned), the whole story, from that day when in one of those improvised dressing rooms, in the shelter of which, with a black eye or a split lip, he was dressing when that trainer hired by de Reixach had offered him a few mounts (for apparently he wasn’t a bad jockey: probably he had only lacked luck till then, and the trainer knew it) including the one where he found he had replaced the man who had hired him, and all this because a woman or rather a girl had one fine day decided she would like to own a racing stable, the notion doubtless suggested by one of those magazines, those monthlies where women on slick paper look like species of birds, long-legged waders, not embellished but merely destroyed as women, a conversion or reduction by man to a simple yardage of silk: creating an angular silhouette, bristling with nails, talons, sharp gestures, and furnished too with that long-legged bird’s stomach, that ostrich belly that allows her not only to digest but to make her own the misogynist and malignant inventions of the designer, and also to reconvert them, somehow in the opposite direction: no longer sophisticated, flat and slick, but that assimilation of silk, leather, jewels to the tender and downy skin so that the leather, the cold silk, the hard stones themselves seem to become something warm, tender, alive . . . —having probably read somewhere, then, that really fashionable people owed it to themselves to own a racing stable, for from all appearances she had never seen a horse before then in her life, Iglésia telling how once she had even taken it into her head to learn to ride too: de Reixach having bought her a half-blood for that purpose, and Iglésia saw them come five or six mornings in a row, she in one (or rather several—each time a different one) of those outfits, he said, that must have cost just for itself as much as the animal on which she tried to sit, and he who could have been her father trying to explain with that same impenetrable, patient and neutral expression that a horse wasn’t exactly a convertible (nor a servant) and wasn’t driven (didn’t obey) in exactly the same way; but that didn’t last (probably, Iglésia said, because no animal has ever enjoyed getting up on the back of another animal, and no animal has ever enjoyed feeling another animal on its back, except in circuses, because after the horse had thrown her once or twice, she didn’t insist), any more, in fact, than the infatuation for the Italian sports car had lasted, and the half-blood stayed in the stable after that, which only made one horse more to groom and exercise, and if she reappeared after that in those riding breeches and those boots that cost as much as the horse on which they were supposed to permit her to mount, it was probably just for the pleasure of exhibiting herself in them, the saddled half-blood waiting an hour or two (that was usually the average delay after the telephone call notifying him to have the horse ready) before she arrived, lingering a moment in the stables and leaving again (usually not in the sports car which already didn’t amuse her much any more, but in that kind of chauffeur-driven hearse as big as a room and on the back seat of which she looked something like the host (that is, something unreal, melting, something that can be known, tasted and possessed only by the tongue, the mouth, by deglutition) in the centre of one of those enormous luxurious monstrances) after distributing a few lumps of sugar and asking to watch—with a massive gold chronometer in her hand which fortunately she didn’t know much about using—the horse that was to run the following Sunday