Eyes of a blue as pale as that in the veins visible beneath the skin of his temples, a blue melting and liquid like that in the eyes of the blind, the beard scant on his cheeks, long and hook-shaped on his chin, rigid, as if it were false, crossed by a brilliant thread of saliva that he would lick as he looked at something with his eyes of a hunted animal, standing among the olive trees with his lame, misanthropic dog panting, adhering to his trouser legs, as motionless as a distant tree on the slope he climbed each night followed by the dog and the half-wild she-goats of his flock to return to the shelter of the slabs of slate where he and the goats and the toothless, cowardly dog lived in the obscene confusion of a trash pile or a stable. Before Frasco led him to the hut and raised the filthy curtain to penetrate the darkness where eyes were gleaming neither animal nor human, only circular and staring, stripped of all reference to a body, all connection to the light shining outside in the yellow fennel and the dark splinters of the escarpments, eyes of phosphorus lit by irrationality or horror, Solana had seen the madman Cardena up close only once, on the riverbank, and it was like meeting straight on an animal that quietly challenges and then flees like a bolt of lightning without any other sign of its appearance remaining except the sudden stabbing of his eyes. As indecipherable as an animal, as the dog whose harsh panting had urged him to turn around impelled by the certainty that he was not alone, the madman Cardena contemplated Solana with an expression of impassive attention, and before fleeing he was shaken by a convulsion as violent and rapid as a shudder, and he said something or simply opened his mouth and couldn't remember what the language of other men was like, because Frasco said that since the spring of '39, when he came to the sierra fleeing the troops that had occupied Magina, the madman Cardena had maintained no other relations in his solitude than with the she-goats and the lame dog who always walked behind him like an extension of his shadow, so that his feigned madness had in the end become true and he no longer knew how to speak except in abrupt monosyllables and brief syncopated phrases like pants or barks that he almost never concluded. The hut where the madman Cardena lived, attached to a vertical wall of slate, went very deep into a cave in whose final recess he had taken shelter with his dog when Frasco and Solana went in to look for him. He was trembling, holding on knees that were tightly pressed together an old Mauser that he had kept for seven years after running out of ammunition, and caressing the ill-treated back of the dog while he shook his head, not daring to raise his eyes, and cursed and denied as if he were being accused in a dream. "I don't remember anything. It wasn't my fault. It was the other one, he stopped the old man, he says to him, give me the ax. Then he told them it was me." He let go of the rifle, which fell to the ground with the trembling of his knees, and he clawed at his beard or clawed at the air with nails that were long, curved, and hard, like uniform beaks, retreating until he rested the back of his neck against the wall. "Cardena," said Frasco, taking a step toward him, bent in the semidarkness because the roof of the cave was so low they couldn't stand up straight, and they waited there in an attitude of useless ambush, exhausted by the stink in the air, by the extremely slow waiting, "Cardena, don't play the idiot with me, you know you can't fool me. Tell us what you told me yesterday, when I gave you the decanter of wine. "
He prowled the perimeter of the Island of Cuba and spied on Frasco from a great distance, almost never daring to cross the invisible frontier drawn by the white boundary stones on the ground, but sometimes he and his dog went onto the estate with the wariness of wolves and spied on the house from the grove of almond trees or followed Frasco, hiding behind the olive trees, jumping from one to the other with an unsettling capacity for silence. "Cardena, come out, I've seen you," Frasco would shout, standing motionless, pretending he still didn't know the place where the madman was stationed, just as when he went hunting and found a very recent trail, and after a while the madman Cardena and his dog would emerge in the middle of the grove, looking at him with alienated, suspicious eyes and shaken by the panting of hunted animals. The madman prowled around the house and followed Frasco to ask him for a decanter of wine or a packet of tobacco, and when at last he was facing him, he would leave on the ground, not saying a word, a sheepskin or a decapitated kid, like a merchant who doesn't know the language of the distant region to which his journey has brought him, and he would hide again and lie in wait until Frasco returned with the tobacco and the wine. Then he would leave his refuge as if he were catching his prey, and when he fled to the river's embankments, he would shout ancient threats and cowardly curses that in the distance became confused with his dog's barking. He would call Frasco a traitor and a Jew and a lackey of capitalism, and he predicted a rat's death for him if he dared denounce him to the Civil Guard, whose three-cornered hats and dark capes appeared to him each night in the shadows of the trees like an unmoving army against which he waged ghostly battles entrenched inside the fences around the corral where he kept his she-goats, aiming at the valley with his unloaded rifle and shouting blasphemies and challenges that dispersed echoes among the precipices of the sierra.
A few hours after running into Jacinto Solana on the riverbank, the madman Cardena called Frasco by whistling to him from the almond trees, but this time he wasn't carrying a recently beheaded kid in his bag, and he didn't threaten him with death if he didn't hand over five liters of wine. "I know that man you're hiding," he said, smiling with his empty eyes, his mouth open and as wet as the snout of his dog, panting next to him, hiding between his legs. "The only one hiding here is you, Cardena. So you can go back the way you came, or I'm calling you know who." Trembling, the madman Cardena and the dog raised their heads at the same time, as if they had detected the scent or the footsteps of an enemy approaching in silence. "You're hiding him so they don't kill him like they killed his father." Then Frasco turned around: the madman, happy at having trapped him as he was walking toward the house, didn't say anything yet, he remained squatting, looking at him while he caressed the dog, who licked his hand, and acting as if he were following the flight of a bird through the branches of the almond trees. "There was no way to knock down that door," he said, not to Frasco, perhaps to the dog or to himself, to the part of his memory not ravaged by madness, rocking back and forth on bent knees as if he were hearing music, "we were knocking and they didn't open, why would they open if they already knew what we were looking for, and then the old man passed by, riding his mule, and that bastard who denounced us afterward saw the ax sticking out of the saddlebag and says, Comrade, lend us the ax and we'll give it right back, and the old man was scared, he didn't want to, and the other one took out his pistol, if you don't give it to us in a nice way we'll take it in a not nice way, I'm denouncing you, we'll see what you're doing at this hour with an ax, the old man trembling, not getting down from the mule, I remember it as if I could see him now, I went up to Magina just to get the ax, and now I'm going back to my farm, and the other one put his pistol to his chest and says, well, now you're going to knock down that door, inside there are some fine gentlemen who don't want to let us in, now that's rude, and the old man, who couldn't stand because he was so scared of the pistol, got off the mule and took out the ax and at first he sort of looked sideways and hit the door very slow, like he didn't know how to use the ax, until the other one pointed the pistol at him again and said, we'll see if he's on the side of the Falangistas inside, and the old man hit the lock three times and knocked down the door, and put the ax back in the saddlebag right away and without getting back on the mule he took the reins and went down the street, but then, when the troops came in, that Judas lost no time going to the Falange and telling them he knew the names of the men who killed the family of Domingo González, and that I was in charge of the patrol, and like everybody knows they asked him for more names, and so to get in good with them, he denounced the old man as an accomplice and was the ruination of us both, since he'll never be at peace as long as I live, because one of these days I'll pick up the rifle and go to Mágina and kill him, and then let them come for me, they won't catch me alive at night or during the day, I'll hang myself before I give myself up to them."