Before he left, when with a clink of the chain he picked up the register and then the gleaming sword, she had asked as if to detain him: ‘May I offer you a glass of Nevado?’, clasping her bony hands together. But he didn’t want to accept. She thought he strangely resembled the person who had occupied the brief splendour of time: of time consumed. The beating of her heart told her so: and with a quiver of the lips she felt the need to love once more the re-emergent presence: but she knew well that no one, no one ever returns.

She drifted about the house: and sometimes unlatched the shutters of a window, to let the sun in, into the main room. The light then met her modest, almost shabby clothing: the small expedients she had managed to repair them with, holding back the tears, the mean dress of her old age. But what was the sun? What day did it bring? over the baying of the darkness. She knew its sizes and its essence, its distance from the earth, from all the other planets: and their movement and orbit; she had learned and had taught many things: and Kepler’s formulations and squarings that pursue the ellipse of our desperate pain into the vacuity of senseless space.fn2

She drifted about, in the house, as though searching for the mysterious path that would have taken her to meet someone: or perhaps just to solitude, devoid of any pity and of any image. From the kitchen, now fireless, to the rooms where voices were no longer heard: occupied by just a few flies. And surrounding the house she still saw the countryside, the sunshine.

Sometimes the sky, so vast over vanished time, was overshadowed by its ominous clouds; which flowed plump and white from the mountains and gathered and then blackened, and suddenly seemed to threaten the person alone in the house, her sons far, terribly far, away. This occurred once again at the close of that summer, one afternoon in early September, after the long heatwave that everyone said would never end: ten days after she had called for the keeper, with the keys: and had wanted to go down, with her, to the cemetery. That menace hurt her deeply. It was the clash, it was the scorn of powers or of beings unknown, and yet bent on persecution: the evil that rises again, again and for ever, after the clear mornings of hope. What always upset her most was the unexpected malevolence of those who had no reason to hate her, or to insult her: of those to whom her trust, so pure, was so unreservedly given, as to equals and to kindred beings in a superior society of souls. Then every consoling experience and memory, value and labour, and support from the city and the people, was suddenly cancelled by the devastation of mortified instinct, the inner strength of awareness was lost: like a child struck by the crowd, knocked down. The barbarized crowd of lost ages, the darkness of things and souls, were a grim enigma, before which she wondered anxiously – (ignorant like a lost child) – why, why?