I understood that, I realized that all he wanted hoped for in that moment was to get himself killed and not only when I saw him there planted on his horse fixed clearly exposed right in the middle of the road without even bothering or seeming to bother to get his horse under an apple tree, that fool of a little second lieutenant thinking himself obliged to do the same thing, probably supposing that it was the last word the ne plus ultra of elegance and chic for a cavalry officer without suspecting for an instant the real reasons that impelled the other man to do it, in other words that it was a question neither of honour nor of courage and still less of elegance but a purely personal matter and not even between him and her but between him and himself. I could have told him, Iglésia could have told him even better than I. But what was the use. I suppose he must have been convinced that he was doing something absolutely sensational and besides why should we have disabused him since that way at least he would die content even ecstatic, dying beside and like a de Reixach, so it was better for him to believe it better for him to be a fool not to ask what was behind that face only slightly bored slightly impatient waiting making us or rather making the campaign service regulations and the orders in case of low-flying aircraft strafing the roads the concession of waiting until they were some distance away and we climbed out of the ditch, turning slightly on his saddle a little exasperated but obliging himself to be patient showing us that still impenetrable expressionless face merely waiting for us to get back on our horses again while they disappeared no larger than dots above the horizon now, then once we were mounted starting again, urging his horse forward with an imperceptible pressure of his legs, the horse apparently starting of its own accord and still at a walk naturally without haste yet not slowly either and not even casually: simply at a walk. I suppose he wouldn’t have started trotting for all the money in the world, that he wouldn’t have driven his spurs into the horse wouldn’t have moved faster if a gun had gone off in his ear and that’s exactly what happened there are expressions that are convenient: at a walk then, and that too must have been part of what he had started four years before and had decided, was in the process of ending or rather of trying to put an end to walking calmly, impassively (in the same way that, according to what Iglésia said, he had always pretended to notice nothing, had never betrayed the slightest emotion neither jealousy nor anger) along that road that was something like a death trap, not war but murder, a place where you were cut down before you had time to know it, the snipers sitting behind the hedge or some bush as though at a county-fair shooting gallery and taking all the time they needed to get you in their sights, in other words a massacre and for a moment I wondered if he didn’t want Iglésia to get his there too, if at the same time he was ending it all for himself he wasn’t also taking a longed-for revenge, but all things considered I don’t think so I imagine that by then everything had become indifferent to him supposing he had ever had anything against Iglésia since after all he had kept him in his service and now he bothered as much or rather as little about him as about me or about that fool of a second lieutenant, probably not feeling any further responsibility not so far as we were concerned personally but in regard to his role his function as an officer, probably thinking that what he could do or not do from that point of view no longer had any importance whatever at the stage we had reached: delivered then released relieved so to speak of his military obligations from the moment his squadron had been reduced to the four of us (his squadron itself being virtually all that had managed to survive of the whole regiment along with maybe a few other dismounted cavalrymen stranded here and there around the countryside) which still didn’t keep him from sitting as straight and stiff on his saddle as if he had been reviewing his men in the Fourteenth of July parade and not in full retreat or rather rout or rather disaster in the middle of this collapse of everything as if not an army but the world itself the whole world and not only in its physical reality but even in the representation the mind can make of it (but maybe it was the lack of sleep too, the fact that we had had almost no sleep at all in ten days except on horseback) was actually falling apart collapsing breaking up into pieces dissolving into water into nothing, and two or three times someone shouted at him not to go on (I don’t know how many, nor who they were: I suppose wounded men, or men hidden in houses or in the ditch, or maybe civilians who incomprehensibly kept wandering around dragging a broken suitcase or pushing those perambulators ahead of them loaded with some kind of luggage (and not even luggage: things, and probably useless: probably just so as not to be wandering around empty-handed, to have the impression the illusion of taking something of possessing something anything as long as there could be attached to it—the split pillow the umbrella or the coloured photograph of the grandparents—the arbitrary notion of price, of value) as if what counted was to be walking, whether in one direction or another: but I didn’t actually see them, all I could see, was still capable of recognizing, like a kind of target, a landmark, was that bony back thin stiff and very straight placed on the saddle, and the serge tunic slightly shinier over the symmetrical bulges of the shoulder blades, and I had long since stopped paying any attention -stopped being able to pay attention—to what could be happening along the roadside); voices, then, unreal and whining crying something (a warning, an alarm) and that reached me across the dazzling and opaque light of that spring day (as if the light itself were dirty, as if the invisible air kept in suspension, like contaminated water, that kind of dusty stinking filth of the war), and he (I could see his head move each time appearing in profile under the helmet, the dry hard outline of the forehead, the eyebrow, and underneath the notch of the eye socket then the firm dry immutable line falling straight from the cheekbone to the chin) looking at them, his expressionless incurious eyes resting for a moment (but apparently without seeing) on the man (or perhaps not even that: only on the place the point the voice came from) who had called to him, and not even reproving severe or annoyed, not even frowning: merely that lack of expression, of interest—at the most maybe astonishment: a little nonplussed, impatient, as though in a salon someone had suddenly spoken to him without having been introduced or had interrupted him in the middle of a sentence with one of those non sequiturs (for instance indicating that the ash of his cigar was about to fall off or that his coffee was getting cold) and perhaps making an effort, a show of goodwill of patience of courtesy to try to understand the reasons or the interest of the remark or if the latter could be related in some way or other to what he had been saying, then giving up any attempt to understand making up his mind without even a shrug of the shoulders probably deciding it is inevitable to meet everywhere always and in any circumstance—in salons or at war—stupid and ignorant people, and that done—in other words decided—forgetting the interrupter, effacing him, no longer seeing him even before looking away, then no longer looking at all at that place where there was nothing, raising his head again and resuming with that little second lieutenant his calm conversation of the sort two cavalrymen riding through the countryside might be having (in training or on manoeuvres) about fellow cavalrymen about promotion about hunting or about racing. And I felt as though I was there, saw it: the green shade with women in bright-coloured print dresses, standing or sitting on iron garden chairs, and men in pale riding breeches talking to them, leaning over them, tapping their boots with their Malacca riding crops, the silks of the horses and those of the women and the tawny leathers of the boots making brilliant spots (mahogany, mauve, pink, yellow) against the deep-green foliage, and the women of that particular class to which do not belong but which is constituted by (to the exclusion of all others) the daughters of colonels or of men with a particle in their name: rather insipid, rather insignificant and frail, keeping until late in life (even married, even after the second or third child) that virginal look, with their long delicate bare arms, their short white girlish gloves, their boarding-school dresses (until they turn suddenly—in the middle thirties—into something rather masculine, rather horsy (no, not mares, horses), smoking and discussing races or horse shows like men), and the faint hum of voices suspended beneath the heavy branches of the chestnut trees, the voices (women’s or men’s) capable of remaining decorous, even, and completely futile while speaking the coarsest or even the rawest remarks, discussing copulations (animal and human) money or first communions with the same inconsequent, agreeable and cavalier ease, the voices then melting into the constant and confused trampling of the boots and the high heels on the gravel, stagnating in the air, the iridescent and impalpable clouds of gilt dust suspended in the calm green afternoon smelling of flowers, dung and perfumes, and he . . .