The child still murmured softly, calling Tachana and Guru, the two children of a neighbour with whom she was in the habit of playing. Then came another fit of suffocation so violent that it surely must be the last. Pepa cried aloud:
“She is dying now ... she is dying.” She flung herself over the bed, clasping the child in her arms then, wild with grief, the wretched mother clutched at her own throat as if she would strangle herself in her delirium of woe. It was a natural semi-savage gesture, a primitive instinct of suffering with the sufferer she loved.
They tried to lead her away, but it was impossible to move her; she clung to the bed.
Leon whispered to the doctor: “why do you not, as a last resource, try tracheotomy?”
But Moreno Rubio answered in a hollow voice:
“At that age it is tantamount to murder.”
“We must try everything; even murder.”
The two men looked like spectres risen from the grave to conspire.
“You desire it?”