“And that was when that burst of machine-gun fire came,” he said (standing there, in front of her, while she went on examining him with that kind of bored, patient, polite curiosity, and sometimes something (not fear but something like a discreet and insolent suspicion awakened, like the thing that sharpens the indifferent stare of cats), something furtive, sharp, sudden flickering across her eyes, and immediately extinguished, the face changeless, that smooth, calm, magnificent and empty mask, “Like those statues,” he thought. “But perhaps that’s all she is, perhaps I should never ask anything more of her than what I would ask of marble, of stone, of bronze: only to let itself be looked at and touched, if she would only let herself be looked at and touched . . .” but he didn’t move, thinking: “But she was crying. He said she was crying . . .”), then he could imagine them both, she and Iglésia, standing in the confusion of the crowd, the incessant grating of the gravel strewn or rather soiled with losing tickets, and Iglésia’s tiny monkey hands tearing up the little pieces of paper that were worthless now, both of them rigid, erect, facing each other: he with that leather-coloured, dazed, woebegone face, his white breeches, his doll’s boots and that triangle of the brilliant rose-coloured silk of his jockey’s uniform appearing between the tattered lapels of the jacket, and she no longer invented now (as Blum said—or rather, no longer fabricated during the long months of war, of captivity, of forced continence, starting from a brief and single glimpse one day at a horse race, Sabine’s gossip, snatches of sentences (themselves representing snatches of reality), confidences or rather almost monosyllabic grumbles wrung by patience and guile from Iglésia, or starting from still less: from a print that didn’t even exist, from a portrait painted a hundred and fifty years ago . . .), but as he could see her now, in front of him, as she really was, since he could (since he was going to) touch her, thinking: “I’m going to do it . . . She’ll slap me, throw me out, but I’m going to do it.” and she still staring at him as if she were looking at him through a sheet of glass, as if she were on the other side of a transparent partition that was as hard, as impenetrable, as glass although apparently as invisible and behind which, ever since he had come, she kept herself sheltered or rather out of reach, leaving to her lips (only her lips, not herself—that is, that sharp or rather sharpened thing, subtle and lightninglike—and perhaps even unknown to herself—that moved so rapidly, flickering across her serene and indifferent gaze) the responsibility of raising like an additional barrier the series of indifferent words, indifferent formulas (saying: “So you were . . . I mean: you belonged to the same regiment, I mean the same squadron as . . .”, not finishing, not pronouncing (as though by a kind of embarrassment, a kind of discretion—or merely laziness) the name (or the two names) which he himself had not been able to bring himself to write in his letter, contenting himself with mentioning merely the number of the regiment and the squadron, as if he too had felt that same embarrassment, that same impossibility), and then he heard her laugh, saying: “But I think we’re distantly related, something like cousins by marriage, aren’t we?. . .”, hearing her pronounce six years later and almost word for word the very words he (de Reixach) had spoken himself one frozen winter morning while behind him passed back and forth the vague and reddish blurs of the horses coming back from the trough where they had had to break the ice so they could drink, and now it was summer—not the first but the second after it had all come to an end, that is, had closed over, formed a scar, or rather (not formed a scar, for already no trace of what had happened was visible any longer) readjusted, mended, and so perfectly that you could no longer detect the least crack, the way the surface of the water closes over a pebble, the landscape that had been reflected for a moment broken, fractured, splintered into an incoherent multitude of fragments, of pieces of sky and trees (that is, no longer the sky, the trees, but confused patches of blue, green, black), recomposing, the blue, the green, the black regrouping, coagulating so to speak, organizing, still undulating a little like dangerous serpents, then motionless, and then nothing but the varnished perfidious surface serene and mysterious, in which was ordered the calm opulence of the branches, the sky, the calm slow clouds, nothing more now than that lacquered and impenetrable surface, thinking (Georges): “So he can probably start believing in them again, lining them up, organizing them elegantly, one after the other, insignificant, sonorous and hollow, in elegant phrases that are insignificant, sonorous, polite and infinitely reassuring, as smooth, as polished, as frozen and as insubstantial as the shiny surface of the water covering, discreetly hiding . . .”