Molten wax dripped on to her trembling hand, burning it: the icy breath of the storm, from the window of the staircase inflected and laminated the flame, making it flicker over the pool and over the grease of the wax: that glimmer of the wick grew dim, in a deathly farewell.

She no longer saw anything. Everything was horror, hatred. Thunder loomed over everything and electric flashes plummeted in anger, gridded repeatedly by the slats of the closed shutters, high up. And here the scorpion, awake, had moved on, as if to one side, as if to outwit her, and she, trembling, had drawn back inside her lone being, stretching out a gelid and weary hand, as though wanting to stop it. Her hair hung over her brow: she dared not say a thing, with lips dry, bloodless: no one, no one would have heard her, beneath the clamour. And who could she call, in these altered times, when, after so many years, there was now so much hatred towards her? If those same infants, over the years, had been a pointless suffering, pride of cemeteries: lost! … in the vanity of the earth …

Why? Why?

From the dark depth of the staircase she looked up from time to time, and even during those hours, to distinguish silent interludes in the storm, the surprised nullity of the space: and of the intervening evening, from the eaves outside, drops, like tears, or the compassionate silence. She imagined that the sudden thrusts of each blast, having hurtled through each room, had left almost like a tardy tribe to regroup towards the plain and the night, where they rejoined their migrant flock. A shutterfn4 was banging, striking the wall of the house. The trees, outside, she heard, gave off light droplets, towards night-time, cleansed as if from weeping.

No one saw her, in the depth of fear, down there, alone, where the yellow light of the wick flickered, paled into the shadows, from the shelf, slowly dying in its liquefied wax. But if someone had happened to see her, oh! even a landsknecht! he would have felt in his heart that this face looking up, petrified, was not even attempting to plead, from vanished distance. Her loose hair rose from her brow, like a breath of horror. Her face barely emerged from the sombre swathe, her cheeks were a trough to the impossibility of tears. Her hooked fingers of old age seemed to be pressing down, down, into the plasma of the dark, the features of someone drawn to solitude. That face, like a spectre, turned away from the underground darknessfn5 to the supernal society of living beings, looking perhaps, without hope, for some assistance, for the voice of a man, of a son.