and I: You don’t think I love you Really you don’t think I love you Then do I love you now Do I love you tell me!—driving against her harder each time leaving her neither time nor strength to answer her throat her lungs releasing only an inarticulate sound but her head rolling wildly from right to left on the pillow against the dark blur of her hair meaning No No No No, they had locked a lunatic up in the pigsty they used as a guardhouse, a man who had gone crazy in a raid sometimes he started screaming endlessly meaninglessly and somehow calmly not stamping or pounding against the door he just shouted and sometimes at night I would wake up listening to him I said What’s that, and he That’s the lunatic, still sulky sullen he curled up again trying to bury his head under his coat, I could see them, see their black shadows coming and going noiselessly in the central lane huddled in their heavy overcoats with their metal dog collars gleaming sometimes under the moon, guns slung over their shoulders, swinging their arms to warm themselves, his voice reached me from under his coat muffled furious saying If I was them I’d give him a good smack across the mouth with my gun then maybe he’d stop braying like that all night long, shouting endlessly meaninglessly in the darkness, shouting then suddenly she stopped released me we lay there like two dead bodies trying to catch our breath as if our hearts had tried to leap out of our mouths with the air, dead inert she and I deafened by the racket of our blood rushing flowing back booming into our limbs rushing across the complicated ramifications of our arteries like what’s that called eagre I think all the rivers beginning to flow in the opposite direction rising towards their sources, as if we had been completely drained for a second, as if our whole life had rushed out of us with the roar of a cataract wrenching uprooting itself from us from me from my solitude freeing itself rushing beyond spreading springing endlessly flooding each other endlessly as if there were no end as if there were never to be any end (but that wasn’t true: only for a second, drunk, thinking it was for ever, but only an instant in reality like when you dream that so many things are happening and when you open your eyes again the clock’s hand has scarcely moved at all) then it flowed back rushing now in the opposite direction as though it had collided with a wall, some insurmountable obstacle that only a small part of ourselves had managed to scale somehow by deception, that is by deceiving simultaneously what opposed its escaping, freeing itself and ourselves, something furious frustrated then in our frustrated solitude, imprisoned again, colliding furiously against the barriers the narrow and insurmountable limits, storming, then gradually that subsided and a moment later she turned on the light, I quickly closed my eyes everything was brown then red I kept them closed I heard the water flowing carrying away dissolving . . . (I could hear it silvery icy and black in the night on the roof of the barn rushing through the gutters it sounded as if in the darkness nature the trees the whole earth was dissolving drowned diluted liquefied crumbled by that slow deluge then I decided to go there myself to join them in the house of the lame man who had invited us for the evening instead of going up to lie down in the brown hay or going back to the café to drink; Wack was still watching, he wasn’t on stable guard tonight and still he stayed there: he watched me pass without a word and go out into the black rain, but I still didn’t manage to see her, finding them already sitting down, three of them with the lame man round the table, Iglésia and another man arguing in low tones beside the stove; only she wasn’t there, standing on the doorstep I looked round for her, but she wasn’t there and finally I asked if this was the Soldiers’ and Farmers’ Soviet, but they turned their suspicious and disapproving eyes on me I said they shouldn’t get up I said I had never been able to learn how to play anything except beggar-my-neighbour and I went to sit down beside the stove: on top was a big enamel coffee pot and the table they were playing on was covered with a yellow oilcloth whose red pattern showed palm trees minarets riders with yataghans and women at a well filling or carrying on their shoulders elongated urns, each time one of the card players put down a card he held it in the air for a second or two then snapped it down with a (triumphant, furious?) gesture on the table which he pounded violently with his fist, then I saw her: not her, that whiteness, that kind of slow and warm apparition glimpsed in the morning in the dimness of the stable, but somehow her contrary or rather her negation or rather her corruption, the corruption of the very idea of woman of grace of pleasure, its punishment: a dreadful old crone with the profile and beard of a goat her head shaken with a continuous tremor and when I sat down beside her on the bench behind the stove she looked at me with two pale-blue almost white eyes that seemed to be liquefied staring at me spying on me for a moment still chewing, ruminating, her greyish whiskers rising and falling, then leaning towards me approaching my face until she was almost touching it her yellow and withered mask (as if I were spellbound, the victim of some enchantment there in that farmer’s kitchen—and in fact it was something like that here in this forsaken landscape cut off from the world with these deep valleys from which rose only a faint tinkle of bells these spongy meadows these wooded slopes the autumn turned the colour of rust—that was it: as if the whole countryside (enclosed in a kind of torpor, a charm, drowned under the silent layer of rain) were rusting corroding gradually rotting with that smell of humus of dead leaves accumulated heaped up slowly putrefying and I the horseman the booted conqueror coming from the depths of the night from the depths of time coming to seduce to carry off the lily-white princess of whom I had dreamt for years and just when I thought she was mine, taking her in my arms, embracing her, holding her close, finding myself face to face with one of Goya’s horrible old crones . . .) saying: I recognized him all right. Yes. With his beard!