The storm, that very day, would drive with long howls through the dreadful mountain gorges, and then flow out into the open against people’s homes and factories. After each sombre build-up of its bitter spite, it unleashed its thunderbolts through the whole sky, like the havoc and pillage of a marauding corsair among sinister flashes and shots. The wind, which had carried her son away towards forgetting cypresses, seemed to be searching at every window for her as well, for her as well, inside the house. From the small window over the staircase, a gust of wind, breaking in, had snatched her by the hair: the creaking floors and their wooden beams seemed about to collapse: like planking, like a ship in a tempest: and its hatches closed, battened down, swollen by that fury outside. And she, like a wounded animal, if it hears the barbarous hunting horns above it again and again, does what it can in its exhausted state to find a refuge, below, beneath the staircase: going down, step by step: into a corner. Timidly overcoming that emptiness of each step, trying them one after the other with her foot, clinging to the banister with her hands that could hardly grip, step by step, down, down, towards the darkness and dampness below. There, a small ledge.

And the gloom nevertheless allowed her to feel her way to a candle, softened, a saucer with some matches, left there for the night hours, for anyone coming home late. No one came home. She struck a match several times, another, on the glass-paper: and here, at last, in the yellowness of that tremulous recognition of the brick floor, here a sliver of horrific darkness, fleeing further, but then suddenly recovering in the stillness of a snare: the blackness of a scorpion. She drew back, shut her eyes, in her final solitude: raising her head, like one who knows there’s no point pleading for kindness. And she shrank within herself, close to annihilation, a painful spark of time: and in time she had been a woman, a wife and a mother. She stopped now, terror-stricken, before the faithless weapon that still she used to push back the darkness. And the blasts and the rampaging glory of the storm followed her there, where she had gone down, down, into the dark depth of every memory, and savagely they hurled themselves at her. The repugnant snare of obscurity: the blackest stain, born from dampness and from evil.

She thought she no longer knew why, why! forgetting, in her extreme distress, that a plea, or love, is possible from the charity of the peoples:fn3 she no longer recalled anything: all previous help from her people was long gone, distant. In vain she had given birth to infants, had given them her milk: no one would realize it in the sulphurous glory of the storms, and of the chaos, no one gave it any further thought: other events had fallen across those distant visceral years, across the torment, across the forgotten tenderness: and the clamour of victory, and the rhetoric and the pomp of victory: and, for her, old age: this last solitude to close the final heavens of the spirit.