Hora de Espana that a soldier left on the train taking us to the front. "Mágina," I wrote, "May 22, 1937," and when I was about to cross out a word to break the excessive rhythm of one of the lines, it was as if all the glass in the gallery and the dome had shattered under the deafening roar of a multitude of pursued men or animals. I had a premonition of sirens and airplane engines rising above the blackness cut by searchlights and the flash of a machine gun, because the instinct of fear returned me to the hideous nights of the bombing of Madrid, but behind the first explosion, in whose immediate recollection I now discerned nearby voices that moved away and a tumult of steps on the roofs and rifle shots, there was only a silence very similar to the one that is prelude to the whistle of a bomb that doesn't explode. I ran to the window and moved aside the curtains, and on the other side of the street I could see, at the edge of the eaves, a very tall shadow that bent forward as it ran and slipped on the roof tiles and finally disappeared as if it had abruptly deserted the body it was pursuing. Then nothing, silence, an empty minute like the foliage in a woods where a hunter's gun has gone off, then footsteps and voices and the weeping of a woman who was Amalia, who came into my room without knocking to tell me that Mariana was dead in the pigeon loft, and the sudden memory of Mariana walking barefoot on the cold tiles a step away from me, my shame hidden behind a corner of the gallery — the curtains were closed across the courtyard windows, and a symmetrical figure invisible to my fascination or my insomnia was stationed behind them, its hand tense on the pistol butt and its ear attentive to the sound like silk swishing of Mariana's footsteps — my stupefaction and desire grown to the now indivisible boundary of my longing to die ever since I learned what the taste of her mouth was like and felt on my fingers the wet warmth that caught at them at the top of her thighs. Some nights, in the house, during this winter, I've left the room with the circular windows, believing I was fleeing the typewriter, and only when I came to the door of the parlor and saw, when I turned on the light, the wedding portrait in which Mariana looks at me with the loyalty of the dead from the distance of that indelible afternoon when she put on her brides dress and obliged Manuel to put on his now useless lieutenant's uniform to pose for the photographer, I understood and accepted that I was repeating the same steps I took ten years earlier in order to listen to her voice behind the closed door of the bedroom where she was turning over entwined with Manuel and breathing with the same fever that had demolished me beneath her body when she said my name and felt my face like a blind person in the perfumed, avid darkness of the garden. Like that night, with the fervor of someone arriving for an impossible appointment, I entered the parlor and looked beneath the door of the bedroom that no one has occupied since then for a line of light, a sign of the one that shone on the gleam of their bodies and was still lit when dawn came through the window, when Manuel was asleep with fatigue and happiness and Mariana, very carefully moving the arm abandoned to sleep that still held her waist, put on her nightgown and closed the shutters before going out so that the light of day would not wake Manuel. I stood still at the glass door to the parlor and the now-forgotten scent of Mariana's body was not in the air, only the discord between the immobility of places and the headlong flight of time, the persistence of the green-topped table and the bronze clock held up by Diana the Huntress and the sofa with yellow flowers, which had been there long before Mariana came to the house and perhaps will remain in the same indifferent quietude when Manuel and I have died. I stepped forward, after turning on the light, poured less than a glass of anisette from the bottle that Manuel and Medina had left on the table after turning off the radio on which they had listened to the remote music of the "Hymn to Riego" and "The International," lifted a light-tobacco cigarette from Manuel's cigarette case, and when I raised my eyes to the oval photograph, from any angle in the room Mariana was looking at me, fixed on me, as if her eyes were pursuing me in the parlor, just as they had looked for me, without a single gesture or movement of her head betraying her, while the photographer prepared his camera and arranged the lights and Orlando and I talked quietly in the semidarkness that covered the other half of the studio. Like the delicate trace of the touch of a leaf that belonged to a tree that became extinct in another era of the world and survives forever transmuted into a fossil, or a shell's whorls imprinted on a rock very far from the sea with a precision more unalterable than that of the effigies on ancient coins, that was how the moment, when my eyes met Mariana's after an entire day of avoiding each other like two accomplices who do not want to be connected to a crime, endured thanks to chance and the magnesium flash firmer than memory and as undeniable as the bronze profile or light tunic of the Diana the Huntress that was always on the sideboard in the parlor. From there I heard the tenacious, failed panting of Manuel and the laugh and entreaty broken by a long groan in which I didn't recognize the voice of Mariana, and still I didn't move, as attentive as a spy, supported by the darkness, when the silence fell and the respiration of two exhausted bodies reached me like the sound of the sea that one hears and still doesn't see behind a line of tall dunes. I was writing in my imagination, I counted syllables and words as if I were segregating an inevitable material completely foreign to my will, a long thread of drivel and dirty literature as interminable as the flow of thought that followed me everywhere and traced the shape of my destiny and each one of my steps. Followed, pushed by literature, calculating under the remorse and jealousy and fear that someone would surprise me in the parlor, the spurious possibility of recounting that critical moment in the future book I was always on the verge of beginning, I went out to the hallway groping at the walls and furniture, and I was returning to my room when at my back the sound of a loose tile that someone was walking on made me hide behind a corner of the gallery. I saw her pass so close I could have touched her just by stretching out a hand impelled by the instinct to repeat just one caress, but her proximity was as remote and forbidden as that of the blind, like them she was surrounded by an irremediable space of solitude. Disheveled, barefoot, a recently lit cigarette between very pale lips, her face illuminated by the dawn had the mysterious intensity of a gaze that divined everything, a serene light tempered by the devastation of love and the melancholy of fatigue and knowledge, as if at the end of that night her beauty and life had been purged of every banal attribute in order to be summarized in the perfection of a few indelible features, just as a few lines drawn as if at random on the blank space of the paper had been enough for Orlando to sketch a profile of Mariana that could never be captured by photographs.