From the terrace, on summer evenings, she could see smoke from the houses on the far horizon, which she imagined populated, each one, with the wife keeping house, the husband in the cattle shed, and the children. Girls were returning, in droves, from the factory, the looms, or winding rooms, or dying-vats at the silk mill: bicycles had brought apprentices back from the anvil: or they had returned behind their father with swaying oxen from the field, and he guiding and controlling his low cart by the shaft: a cart with short, sloping, open sides, with small wheels on slick, silent axles, piled up with implements and with labour, with logs and with hay: on which tired scythes lay, as though forgotten, in the evening shadow.

Rustic offspring back numberless from work to the hearth, to a spoon: to the poor chipped bowls that compensated their day.

Far-off gleams of light, and song, reached her from outside the house. As if a housewife had taken her copper pot outside to dry in the yard, to reflect, glinting, the sunset. Perhaps to greet her, the Señora!, who herself had once, like them, been a woman, a wife and a mother. She envied no one. She wished all of them, all of them, the joy and calm strength of sons, that they would have work, health, peace: good marches in morning where the captain commands them: that they would soon find their bride, once back from the regiment, in the fragrant throng of girls.

And so, each day, she found some reason or excuse to call for the washerwoman, the baker’s daughter, the woman who sold lemons or sometimes a rare Tierra Caliente orange, the retainer’s eighty-six-year-old mother, or the fishmonger’s wife. (She had reason to think the last of these didn’t have a complete set of clothes on her person.) They were poor, dark pikes, whose gloomy noses were pointed with the wants of poor people; pikes that had swum and swum through green dearth towards the silvery flash of Durendal; or tench, large, yellow lake fish with a greasy and vapid slime, which, even with carrots and celery, still had a muddy taste; harpooned up by line from the Seegrün after the hour of sunset, or from that other valley, most sweet in autumn, of the abbé-poet, or that other valley still further away, of the painter disciple, when it mirrors, beneath liquefied clouds, the upturned indentation of the mountain.

With carrots and celery, on a slow flame, in the long pike kettle; she stirred that sludge with a wooden spoon: out of which came something full of bones, of celery, but fairly appetizing. Once cooked, all that remained was to taste it; she was happy, offered it all to the women. The women praised her for her wonderful cooking, repaid her for her kindness.

She envied no one. Perhaps, after so much courage and concern, after having striven and suffered, and having produced her offspring without tears, so that they, the strategists of the republic,fn6 might have her finest blood at their disposal!, to do whatever they commanded; perhaps after the fiery haste of every day, and of the years, tired ellipses, perhaps the time was right: gentle assuager of every sacrifice: oh! it would take her to the place where people forget and are forgotten, beyond the houses and the walls, along the path attended by cypresses.