probably he preferred not to have to do it himself, hoped that one of them would take care of it for him, would spare him that nasty interval but maybe he still doubted that she (that is, Reason, that is, Virtue, that is, his little pigeon) was unfaithful to him, perhaps it was only when he came in that he found something like a proof, for example that groom hidden in the closet, something that convinced him, indicating in an irrefutable way what he refused to believe or perhaps what his honour forbade him to see, the very thing that leapt to his eyes since Iglésia himself said that he had always pretended to notice nothing telling about the time when he had almost caught them, when trembling with fear or unsatisfied desire she had scarcely had time to pull down her dress in the stable and he not even glancing at her going straight towards that filly leaning down to feel her hocks saying only Do you think that revulsive will be enough it seems to me that the tendon is still swollen I think we’d better give her a little heat, and still pretending to see nothing pensive and futile on that horse as he advanced to meet his death whose finger was already pointed at him laid on him his stiff bony body cambered on his saddle at first a blur no larger than a fly for the concealed sniper a thin vertical figure above the gun sight, growing larger as he approached the motionless and attentive eye of his patient murderer index finger on the trigger seeing so to speak the reverse of what I could see or I the back and he the front, that is, between us—I following him and the other man watching him advance—we possessed the totality of the enigma (the murderer knowing what was going to happen to him and I knowing what had happened to him, that is, after and before, that is, like the two parts of an orange cut in half and that fit together perfectly) in the centre of which he rode ignoring or wanting to ignore what had happened as well as what would happen, in that kind of nothingness (as it is said that in the centre, the eye of a hurricane there exists a perfectly calm zone) of knowledge, that zero point: he would have needed a mirror with several panels, then he could have seen himself, growing larger until the sniper gradually made out the stripes, the buttons of his coat even the features of his face, the gun sight now choosing the best spot on his chest, the barrel shifting imperceptibly, following him, the glint of sunlight on the black steel through the sweet-smelling hawthorn hedge. But did I really see him or think I saw him or merely imagine him afterwards or even only dream it all, perhaps I was asleep had I never stopped sleeping eyes wide open in broad daylight lulled by the monotonous hammering of the shoes of the five horses trampling their shadows not walking at quite the same gait so that it was like a crepitation alternating catching up with itself superimposing mingling at moments as if there were now only one horse, then breaking apart again disintegrating starting over apparently running after itself and so on over and over, the war somehow stagnant, somehow peaceful around us, the sporadic cannon fire landing in the deserted orchards with a muffled monumental and hollow sound like a door flapping in the wind in an empty house, the whole landscape empty uninhabited under the motionless sky, the world stopped frozen crumbling collapsing gradually disintegrating in fragments like an abandoned building, unusable, left to the incoherent, casual, impersonal and destructive work of time.