med the visible attributes of his status as stranger, the proof that in spite of the dark suit, the black tie, the summary expression of grief, he did not belong to the group of people in mourning who had gathered around the grave and murmured prayers that in the distance of the afternoon and the empty cemetery sounded like the buzz of insects. Old distant faces, unrecognizable, enervated by heat and oppressive mourning clothes, surrounded by crosses, by the yellow brilliance of the hedge mustard flowers that erased the graves and the paths that separated them and wound around their feet like a swamp of roots. Of all of them, only Medina kept himself partially free of decrepitude, fat and impassive, his arms folded, his hair still black, looking at the men sliding the coffin between rough ropes into the hole of the grave with the composed attention he would bring to looking at a patient who had just died. But Inés didn't look at the grave, Minaya noticed, although she kept her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap and she moved her lips, pretending to repeat the prayers of the others. Only he, who spied on her and her gestures looking for a sign that would allow him to recognize in her the same woman who had embraced him last night, not to get her back but in order not to lose the right to tell himself at least that certain things now impossible had happened to him, realized that Inés had secretively moved her eyes toward a corner of the cemetery, toward a mausoleum shaded by cypresses beside which a man seemed to pray as he leaned on a cripple's crutches. The brim of his hat covered his face, and his head sank between his shoulders, exaggeratedly raised by the crutches. Inés noticed Minaya's questioning and she stared fixedly again at the ground and pretended to pray, but her eyes beneath long lashes slid slowly beyond the still-open grave, over the hedge flowers, as if all of her and not only her gaze were fleeing, just as she did when Minaya was talking to her and she stopped hearing him and smiled at him so he couldn't follow her in her flight or decipher a thought in which she was alone. Taut with the weight of the coffin, the ropes were lowered, rubbing against the sharp marble edges, and one of the men holding them stopped to wipe his brow, interrupting for a single second the voices that were praying. In that fraction of silence, Inés raised her head and looked openly at the man on crutches. He was looking at them too, motionless, leaning on the crutches as if they were a windowsill he had reached using the last of his strength, and although Minaya couldn't see his face, he imagined an indecent curiosity in those eyes covered by shadow and veiled by distance, shining in a sudden reflection of glass when the man began to walk and came out from the cypresses, awkward and very slow, ruined and tenacious between the crutches that preceded him, testing the ground as if looking for hidden graves beneath the hedge flowers. The grave diggers retrieved the ropes, and Doña Elvira took a few steps forward and began to drop earth on the now-invisible coffin without completely opening her hands, as if waiting for someone to capture her gesture in a photograph. The man walked more and more slowly toward the metal grillwork of the cemetery gate, hugging an adobe wall, disappearing at times behind a mausoleum and then reappearing more worn and more awkward, more impossibly determined to reach the exit. He was very close to it when he seemed to give up walking and leaned his back against the whitewashed wall, and now Inés, who could no longer look at him without turning her head, said something to Amalia that Minaya couldn't hear, crossed herself at the grave, and with the same haste moved away from it to go toward the man, who was no longer leaning against the wall. Before he followed her without waiting for the grave diggers to adjust the stone, Minaya remembered that when he came to the cemetery there was a taxi parked next to the gate. He heard the engine starting up and he ran faster, jumping over the graves and the hedge flowers, his heart pounding in his chest as violently as when he had run that winter from the guards along the avenues of Madrid, no longer asking himself what the others would think or who the man on crutches was, but when he reached the cemetery gate, when he stopped on the dusty esplanade where the road to the city began between two rows of cypresses, he saw the taxi driving away leaving behind a translucent cloud of dust and exhaust and the fleeting image as dazzling as a powder flash of two faces that looked at him through the rear window and were immediately erased in the dust, in the distance of rows of cypresses and the first houses in the city. He kept running and waved his hand and probably called to Inés asking her to stop the taxi, but his voice was inaudible and his figure became smaller as the successive shadows of cypresses multiplied in the window, and finally he stood motionless in the distance of the road, still moving his right hand, as if he were saying good-bye, powerless and vanquished, overwhelmed by fatigue, by the incredible certainty that he was partially opening the prelude to the true story when he believed he had left its conclusion behind him. And now it was only a question of waiting for him to come, to cross the fields and the last streets of Magina, walking very quickly, not seeing or hearing anything of what was happening around him, because the city, the cars, the people he bumped into on the sidewalks were moving out of his way like a sea that parts to show him the only road he should follow, running until he was out of breath and his legs had given out, advancing with no progress, no respite, beyond fatigue, as if only the devastating will to reach the plaza where he had waited so often for Inés kept him on his feet, the plaza where he was tediously condemned to look at Utreras heroic monument and the hermetic balconies of the house she had never allowed him to enter. "My uncle is sick. He doesn't want to see anybody," she would say. "I'd like to meet him." "He can't, at least not now. I'll let you know when he's better." All that was left was to wait for him with the avid, feigned, wary calm of a hunter who has laid his trap and crouches in the darkness, in the propitious thicket where the muffled movement of a body will sound and then the cold crack of the trap when it closes. "He's here," said Inés from the window when we heard the bell at the entrance. He pulled on the cord several times, but nobody answered, and then he went into the house, into the devastated courtyard above which damp clothes hang on lines, closing off the sky and the railing of rotting wood where the women who live in the rooms along the corridor go to shout at one another or to empty buckets and basins of dirty water, where they lean in the sun, with embroidered housecoats over their shoulders, to dry their hair on Sunday mornings. It always smells of damp, of deep, dark places, of wet lime and stone and cesspool water. From the railing a dry, disheveled woman moved aside the sheets on the lines and pointed to the end of the courtyard when Minaya asked for Inés. "That Inés and her uncle live in the second yard, up top, at the back of the stairs. I saw them come in a little while ago. Now they're riding in a car, like rich people." The sheet fell back like a sopping wet curtain on the woman and her laugh, which was prolonged in other voices along the corridor, in glances of suspicion and mockery that followed Minaya from above until he disappeared into a gloomy passage that took him to another courtyard without a railing or wooden columns, a courtyard like a well, with high unwhitewashed walls, with a single window and a tree whose topmost branches stretched toward it, brushing against open shutters. "Now he's coming up," said Inés, and she moved away from the window, picking up again the needle she had just threaded and the frame where she was embroidering something, a sketch of blue flowers and birds that she looked at meditatively as she sat down in the chair she always used to sew, so absorbed in the needle and the movement of her fingers that touched the taut cloth, searching for the exact spot where she should make the next stitch, that she seemed to have forgotten that Minaya was climbing the stairs, coming closer and closer to me, to us, to the instant when his eyes would meet the eyes of a dead man and when he would hear the impossible and somehow revived voice of a manuscript he hadn't found yet, of so many words deceitfully calculated and written to trap him in a book that had existed only in his imagination, that has ended now, as if he, Minaya, had closed it just as he closed the door when he left here. But perhaps, as he climbed the stairs knowing he was approaching me, he was tempted to turn around, to close his eyes and his intelligence and his sleepless desire to know and leave for the station and Madrid as if he hadn't seen the man on crutches in the cemetery, as if not a single doubt was left that could stain or undo the history he had looked for and now possessed. He climbed up as if going down to a dark basement, he stopped in front of the only door in the corridor, abruptly I was no longer hearing his footsteps, and I guessed he was standing still behind it. "Come in, Minaya, don't stay out there," I said, "we've been expecting you for an hour."