the Regular Army."
Inexhaustible, intact, and useless, like Magina's light and its statues with Greek profiles, rancor is the only thing they save or that saves them from oblivion and strengthens the persistence of pride over the void. Each morning, attended by Teresa and Amalia, who climbs the stairs very slowly and holds the railing and the walls and breathlessly reaches the top floor of the house, Dona Elvira dresses ceremoniously before a mirror and combs her white hair waved according to the by-now blurred style of 1930, at times permitting herself a drop of perfume at her wrists and on her neck and a light shadow of pink powder on her cheeks. How is my son, she asks without looking at anyone or expecting anyone to answer, directing her gaze over the heads of the two women moving around her, because she was taught that this was how a lady ought to address her servants, remind Inés that today is Thursday and she has to bring me the magazines. Has the administrator called? Have someone let him know. I want to settle the olive accounts with him before I forget about it and he cheats me. Dressed and perfumed as if she were going out, though she does that only early in the morning on Good Friday, Dona Elvira contemplates her own firm body in the mirror and smooths with her index finger the deleted line of her eyebrows.
"Teresa, when you've made the bed, water the geraniums. Don't you see they're withering?"
Still in front of the mirror, without turning around or raising her voice, Doña Elvira sees Teresa pulling the sheets and quilt from the large double bed where she still sleeps forty years after becoming a widow, and she suddenly notices, with secret satisfaction, how much the maid who was only a girl when she entered her service has aged. The cold yellow sun of February enters obliquely through the large window to the terrace, leaving on the tiles a damp stain of light, sifted down like pollen, which surrounds things without ever touching them and slides over to the doorway where Amalia, who almost doesn't see it, is standing and waiting.
"Does the señora want anything else?"
"Nothing, Amalia. Tell Inés she can bring me the paper and my breakfast now."
Before he was allowed to meet her, Doña Elvira imposed herself on Minaya's consciousness like a great absent shadow, depicted, with severe precision, in the fear with which Jacinto Solana imagined her many years earlier, in certain customs and words that ambiguously alluded to her, almost never naming her, not explaining her seclusion or her life, only suggesting that she was there, in the topmost rooms, appearing at the balcony of the greenhouse or looking at the garden from the window where her figure sometimes was outlined. A tray with the silver teapot and a single cup set out at midafternoon on the kitchen sideboard, the
ABC
folded and unopened, the illustrated magazines that Inés bought every Thursday at the kiosk on the Plaza of General Orduña, the account books next to the coat and hat of the administrator, who talks to Amalia in the courtyard, waiting until Doña Elvira wishes to receive him, the sound of the television set and the piano canceling each other out and confused in the distance with the fluttering wings of pigeons against the glass in the dome. He had learned to catalogue and discover the signs of Doña Elvira's presence and always to fear her when he walked alone down the hallways, and one day, without anything foretelling it, Inés told him that the señora had invited him to tea that afternoon in her rooms. The way up began with a door at the back of the gallery and crossed a dark region of rooms, perhaps never occupied, that had religious paintings on the walls and porcelain saints enclosed in crystal urns. Solitary figures on credenzas looking into empty space with lost, glassy eyes, looking at Minaya like motionless guardians of no-man's-land as he crossed the deserted semidarkness behind Inés' footsteps and
Inexhaustible, intact, and useless, like Magina's light and its statues with Greek profiles, rancor is the only thing they save or that saves them from oblivion and strengthens the persistence of pride over the void. Each morning, attended by Teresa and Amalia, who climbs the stairs very slowly and holds the railing and the walls and breathlessly reaches the top floor of the house, Dona Elvira dresses ceremoniously before a mirror and combs her white hair waved according to the by-now blurred style of 1930, at times permitting herself a drop of perfume at her wrists and on her neck and a light shadow of pink powder on her cheeks. How is my son, she asks without looking at anyone or expecting anyone to answer, directing her gaze over the heads of the two women moving around her, because she was taught that this was how a lady ought to address her servants, remind Inés that today is Thursday and she has to bring me the magazines. Has the administrator called? Have someone let him know. I want to settle the olive accounts with him before I forget about it and he cheats me. Dressed and perfumed as if she were going out, though she does that only early in the morning on Good Friday, Dona Elvira contemplates her own firm body in the mirror and smooths with her index finger the deleted line of her eyebrows.
"Teresa, when you've made the bed, water the geraniums. Don't you see they're withering?"
Still in front of the mirror, without turning around or raising her voice, Doña Elvira sees Teresa pulling the sheets and quilt from the large double bed where she still sleeps forty years after becoming a widow, and she suddenly notices, with secret satisfaction, how much the maid who was only a girl when she entered her service has aged. The cold yellow sun of February enters obliquely through the large window to the terrace, leaving on the tiles a damp stain of light, sifted down like pollen, which surrounds things without ever touching them and slides over to the doorway where Amalia, who almost doesn't see it, is standing and waiting.
"Does the señora want anything else?"
"Nothing, Amalia. Tell Inés she can bring me the paper and my breakfast now."
Before he was allowed to meet her, Doña Elvira imposed herself on Minaya's consciousness like a great absent shadow, depicted, with severe precision, in the fear with which Jacinto Solana imagined her many years earlier, in certain customs and words that ambiguously alluded to her, almost never naming her, not explaining her seclusion or her life, only suggesting that she was there, in the topmost rooms, appearing at the balcony of the greenhouse or looking at the garden from the window where her figure sometimes was outlined. A tray with the silver teapot and a single cup set out at midafternoon on the kitchen sideboard, the
ABC
folded and unopened, the illustrated magazines that Inés bought every Thursday at the kiosk on the Plaza of General Orduña, the account books next to the coat and hat of the administrator, who talks to Amalia in the courtyard, waiting until Doña Elvira wishes to receive him, the sound of the television set and the piano canceling each other out and confused in the distance with the fluttering wings of pigeons against the glass in the dome. He had learned to catalogue and discover the signs of Doña Elvira's presence and always to fear her when he walked alone down the hallways, and one day, without anything foretelling it, Inés told him that the señora had invited him to tea that afternoon in her rooms. The way up began with a door at the back of the gallery and crossed a dark region of rooms, perhaps never occupied, that had religious paintings on the walls and porcelain saints enclosed in crystal urns. Solitary figures on credenzas looking into empty space with lost, glassy eyes, looking at Minaya like motionless guardians of no-man's-land as he crossed the deserted semidarkness behind Inés' footsteps and
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