The film's ending, drawn out like a birth, shows the process of casting the bell. The feudal lord wants a new bell, but a plague has decimated the population and the old caster has died. The lord's men go looking for the caster, but all they find is a house in ruins and a lone survivor, the caster's adolescent son. He tries to convince them that he knows how to cast a bell. The lord's henchmen are dubious at first, but finally take the boy with them, having warned him that he will pay with his life if there is anything wrong with the bell.
From time to time, the monk, who has renounced painting and sworn a vow of silence, walks through the countryside, past the place where workers are building a mold for the bell. Sometimes the boy makes fun of him (as he makes fun of everything). He taunts the monk by asking him questions and laughs at him. Outside the city walls, as the construction of the mold progresses, a kind of festival springs up in the shadow of the scaffolding. One afternoon, as he is walking past with some other monks, the former painter stops to listen to a poet, who turns out to be the beatnik, the one he unwittingly sent to prison many years ago. The poet recognizes the monk and confronts him with his past action, and tells him, in brutal, childish language, about the hardships he had to bear, how close he came to dying, day after day. Faithful to his vow of silence, the monk does not reply, although by the way he looks at the poet you can tell he is taking responsibility for it all, the things that were his fault and the things that were not, and asking for forgiveness. The people look at the poet and the monk and are completely bewildered, but they ask the poet to go on telling them stories, to leave the monk alone and make them laugh again. The poet is crying, but when he turns back to his audience he recovers his spirits.
And so the days go by. Sometimes the feudal lord and his nobles visit the makeshift foundry to see how work on the bell is progressing. They do not talk to the boy but to one of the lord's henchmen who serves as intermediary. The monk keeps walking past, watching the work with growing interest. He doesn't know himself why he is so interested. Meanwhile, the tradesmen who are working under the boy's orders are worried about their young master. They make sure he eats. They joke with him. Over the weeks they have become fond of him. And finally the big day arrives. They hoist up the bell. Everyone gathers around the wooden scaffolding from which the bell hangs to hear it ring for the first time. Everyone has come out of the walled city: the feudal lord and his nobles and even a young Italian ambassador, for whom the Russians are barbarians. Everyone is waiting. Lost in the multitude, the monk is waiting too. They ring the bell. The chime is perfect. The bell does not break, nor does the sound die away. Everyone congratulates the feudal lord, including the Italian. The city celebrates.
When it is all over, in what had seemed a fairground but is now a wasteland scattered with debris, only two people remain beside the abandoned foundry: the boy and the monk.
The boy is sitting on the ground crying his eyes out. The monk is standing beside him, watching. The boy looks at the monk and says that his father, the drunken pig, never taught him the art of casting bells and would have taken his secrets to the grave; he taught himself, by watching. And he goes on crying. Then the monk crouches down and, breaking what was to be a lifelong vow of silence, says, Come with me to the monastery. I'll start painting again and you can make bells for the churches. Don't cry.
And that's the end of the movie.
When B stops talking, U is crying.
The pale girl is sitting on her chair looking at something out the window, perhaps just the night. Sounds like a good film, she says, and keeps looking at something that B can't see. U drinks his glass of wine in a single gulp and smiles at the pale girl, then at B, and hides his head in his hands. Silently, the pale girl gets up, leaves the room, and comes back with U's wife and the hostess. U's wife kneels down beside him and strokes his hair. The host and the tarot card reader appear in the corridor and stand there in silence, until the tarot card reader sees the bottle of wine left on the table and goes to pour herself a glass.
This has the effect of a starting gun. They all proceed to help themselves to the wine. The tarot reader proposes a toast. The host proposes a toast. The pale girl proposes a toast. When B goes to refill his glass there is no wine left. Good-bye, he says to his hosts. And off he goes.
It is only when he reaches the entrance hall (the dark entrance hall and the street awaiting him beyond) that he realizes he didn't recount the film for U's benefit but for his own.
This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature.
B does not see U or his wife again. In fact, B no longer needs U or the radiant ghost he used to imagine when he thought of U's life in ruins. One day, however, he hears of U's trip to Paris to visit an old friend from the MIR. U travels with another Chilean. They take a train. Shortly before arriving in Paris, U gets up, leaves the compartment without saying anything, and doesn't come back. His friend wakes up as the train begins to move again. He looks for U but can't find him. After talking with the conductor he concludes that U got off at the station they have just left. At the same time, in the early hours of the morning, the telephone rings in U's house. By the time his wife has woken up, got out of bed, and walked to the living room, the phone has stopped ringing. Shortly afterward the telephone rings in the house of a friend, who does pick up the receiver in time and is able to speak with U. U says that he is in some French village, that he was going to Paris but suddenly, inexplicably, changed his mind, and is now heading back to Barcelona. The friend asks him if he has enough money on him. U replies in the affirmative. According to the friend, U seems calm and even relieved to have made this decision. So the train in which U was traveling continues on its way north to Paris, while U starts walking through the village, southward, as if he had fallen asleep and set off sleepwalking back to Barcelona.
He makes no more telephone calls.
Beside the village there is a wood. At some point during the night U leaves the path and enters the wood. The next day a farmer finds him: he has hanged himself from a tree with his own belt, not as simple a task as it might seem at first. The gendarmes find U's passport and his other papers, his driver's licence and social security card, scattered far from the corpse, as if U had thrown them away as he walked through the wood or tried to hide them.
VAGABOND IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM
B has crossed the border into France. In five months of wandering he will spend all the money he has. Ritual sacrifice, gratuitous act, boredom. Sometimes he takes notes, but as a rule he limits himself to reading. What does he read? Detective novels in French, a language he hardly understands, which makes the novels more interesting. Even so, before the last page he always guesses who the murderer is. France is not as dangerous as Spain and B needs to feel that he is in a low-danger zone. B has crossed the border with money to spend because he has received an advance from his publisher, and after putting 60 percent of the sum in his son's bank account he has gone to France because he likes France. Simple as that. He took the train from Barcelona to Perpignan, spent half an hour walking around the Perpignan station, until he felt he had understood what there was to understand; he ate in a restaurant in the city, saw an English movie, and then, as night was falling, took another train, direct to Paris.
In Paris, B stays in a little hotel in the rue Saint-Jacques. The first day he visits the Luxembourg Gardens, sits on a park bench and reads, then goes back to the rue Saint-Jacques, finds a cheap restaurant, and eats there.