Yet building something is so arduous. There’s a silent resentment against the effort, a destructive underground current, the impulse of the child who tramples his recently completed sandcastle at the beach, the joy of flattening towers with the sole of the foot, destroying walls with a kick; Miguel crying in his room, red-faced, surrounded by the ruins of the Meccano, too much crying for his age, his sister looking at him with annoyance from her desk; teams of dynamiters in the late July heat and the first hallucinatory days of the war attempting to blow up the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Los Angeles Hill, bringing large augers and hammer drills on trucks from Madrid, squads of militiamen firing their rifles in successive volleys at the enormous statue, its arms spread wide; the crowd illuminated by the brilliance of the flames, eyes shining, the unanimous uproar that burst from open mouths on the night of July 19 when they saw the dome of a church collapse amid brilliant embers and a lava of melted lead. In the heat of the summer night the fire, like blasts from a furnace, made the air tremble. How much time, how much labor, how much ingenuity had gone into building that dome a little more than two centuries ago, how many men breaking stone, how many mules and oxen dragging huge blocks from the quarry, how many trees and how many axes needed to prepare the rafters, how many callused hands skinned, tugging on pulley ropes, in which furnaces was lead molded for the roofs or the red clay and glazed tiles baked? But everything burned so quickly; the fire sucked in hot air to keep feeding its own voracity; around Ignacio Abel men and women danced as if celebrating the apotheosis of a primitive deity, some shooting rifles or pistols into the air, as intoxicated by fire as by words or anthems, celebrating not the literal collapse of a church dome in Madrid but the imaginary downfall of an old world that deserved to perish. He recalls the sensation of the fire stinging the skin on his face, the smell of gasoline, the suffocating smoke after a gust of wind, the taste of ash in his mouth, and afterward the stink of smoke on his clothes. The other side destroys with more modern methods, not with the fire of medieval apocalypses but with Italian and German planes that machine-gun refugees on the roads and drop bombs from a comfortable height over a Madrid that lacks not only antiaircraft defenses but also effective searchlights and sirens. Our side executes crudely, with fury, the other side with the methodical deliberation of butchers, shooting from a distance and with infallible marksmanship at terrified militiamen who run away, then using sharpened bayonets up close. Neither side rests at night. At night the designated victim offers even less resistance. He waits motionless, apathetic, like an animal transfixed by the headlights of the car that will knock it down. On both sides, headlights are the last thing those who are going to be executed see. As for Professor Rossman, whose glasses had been stomped on, the light must have hurt his poor colorless eyes. In the darkness Ignacio Abel heard a voice saying his name, and it took him a moment to realize that if he didn’t see anything, it was because he was covering his eyes with both hands.