This name rested lightly on her mind: and was a cherished presence, a suggestion almost of morning and of a dream, a wing that flew high above, a light. Yes: there was her son, in the time, in the certainty and in the experience of the living: and even after the transformation, after the precipitation of the years. He walked among the living. He walked along the paths of men. Her first son. The one in whose young body she had yearned to see, oh! days!, the proof of nature’s deficiency, a failed experiment of the womb after the accepted fraud of the seed, reluctant to have suffered, to have generated something not its own: in a long and untreatable eclipse of her whole being, in the weariness of the mind, of the womb opened then to the slow disgrace of birth, in the derision of shrewd traffickers and merchants, under the constriction of the duties they impose, so nobly promoting the common good, to the suffering and misery of honest people. And now there was the son: just the one son. He wandered the parched roads along the fleeing elms, after the dust towards the evenings and the trains. Her first son. Oh! Only the raincloud – whistling skies lashing over the bent trees of the countryside – only terror could have separated her in such a way from the truth, from the sound security of memory. Her son: Gonzalo. Gonzalo, no, no!, he had not been awarded the funerary honours of darkness; his mother recoiled at the memory: away, away!, from the empty funeral, the dirges, the vile tears, the wailing: no candles had burnt down from on high, for him, between the pillars of the cold nave and arches darkened by the centuries. When the song of the abyss, among the candles, calls for those sacrificed to go down, down, into the verminous pomp of eternity.

The sound of a horn, from the highway: and emptiness. All went silent, at last. The cats, at the usual time, of course, had come here into the house, from where only they could enter: velvet presences were staring at her from halfway down the staircase, with eyes like topaz in the dark, but cleaved with a cut, their pupils lined with hunger: and, meowing, they gave her a timid greeting, a cry: ‘It’s time’. Domestic order and charity urged her up. And she, forgetting her own suffering, concerned herself immediately, as always, with that of others: she went back upstairs. The clomping stride of the peasant sounded on the brick floor above: back from buying tobacco, and perhaps, she hoped, some salt: he called out to her in the darkness, told her about the provisions and the fire, told her what time it was, how the crops were ruined: he moved around, still jabbering, opening the shutters, the windows. Consoled, once again she saw the sweet and distant resplendence of the village, and those everlasting words blossomed in her sweet memory: ‘Open the balconies – open the family terraces and loggias’: almost as though the reconstituted society of men had reappeared to her after a long night. And the faithful retainer, here, in front of the cats, was moving about the house: from his own hearth to another, so spacious and gelid: carrying flares, thyrsi; and then on the stairs; doors and windows banged behind the quadrupedal flight of clogs. And twigs and branches dropping more or less everywhere along the man’s route. And the wind had lost itself towards the plain, in the direction of Pequeño.