"Let's go," said Beatriz, and she opened the car door, but the wounded man and the other man didn't seem to hear her, as if they didn't believe in the mirage she announced when she showed them the house. She got out with her head bowed to keep the branches of the olive tree from tangling in her hair, and when she looked again for the light she had seen slipping from window to window, like ghosts in the movies, she couldn't find it, but there was a motionless figure in the middle of the esplanade, at the edge of the river embankment, and although from that distance it was impossible for her to see his face, she recognized in a melancholy way, like someone who listens to a piece of music and recovers an intimate feeling that had been forgotten, the shape of his shoulders, the way Jacinto Solana sometimes looked at things with his head tilted to one side and his hands lazily thrust into his pockets. "I'll go alone," she said then, "you two wait here." She crossed the tracks, the bridge, she disappeared in the fog, emerged on the other side of the river, and from there she turned to verify with relief that the car had dissolved in the shadow of the two olive trees hiding it. As indifferent and silent as a tree mineralized by the moon, Solana didn't notice her approach, and saw Beatriz only when she was almost at the end of the road and said his name, first in a quiet voice, as if she were afraid the light that dilated forms and endowed them with the hardness of figures of salt could also enlarge and disfigure the sound of voices, then shouting or perhaps hearing her own voice like the pale shouts in dreams, because the sound of the water erased it, and it vanished in the brilliance of the moon and in the warped space of the olive groves and the liquid blue sierra, as weightless and extended as the fog. "Jacinto," she said again, in a louder voice, but her voice didn't sound to him like a shout, "it's me, Beatriz."
"The three of them are dead," he wrote a few hours later in the blue notebook, after leaving them hidden in the wine cellar and lowering the heavy trap door with the feeling he was adjusting the slab of stone over a tomb, "they're dead and they know it, and maybe I am too, because death is a contagious disease. When they put the car in the shed and I took them to the kitchen, they walked back and forth as if they were in a death cell and ate with the same bitter greed I saw so often in those men who knew they were going to be shot at daybreak. The wounded one shakes and sweats with fever and Beatriz passes him a wet handkerchief for his forehead, and then she returns to scraping the bottom of a can of sardines with her oil-stained fingers, with her long painted nails. They tell me they've gone twenty-four hours without eating, that last night, after the encounter with the Civil Guard, they fled along highways they didn't know and didn't stop until dawn, in an abandoned house, in the middle of a red plain where there was nothing and nobody, not a tree or an animal or a human or a sierra or a city in the distance. At nightfall they left again for the south, and suddenly, Beatriz says, when she had lost consciousness of how many hours she had been driving, she saw in the headlights the sign for a city, Magina, and then a lit, deserted gas station that might have a public telephone. As on other occasions, in years gone by, when letters hadn't been enough and she would call Manuel to ask if he knew anything about me, she asked the operator for his number and waited a long time until she heard the alarmed voice stupid with sleep that said the Island of Cuba and explained how to get here. The Island of Cuba, she says to me with exhausted irony, only you could end up living in a place with a name like that.'"