"Delgado's cleaning the pool.... You should see the jacaranda blossoms scattered on the water, flowers and leaves too. Did you hear about the eucalyptus? It blew down, the giant one beside the corral. They had to saw it into sections and drag off the pieces with oxen...." He found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. Perplexed by the gravity of her illness, he tried to ransack his brain for some old remedy. Carmela came with a tray and he rose and said good morning to her.
By coaxing, they got Caterina to eat some thin atole; but then, in a little while, she vomited, and knotted under the covers, shivering with anguish.
By the time Dr. Velasco arrived, pounding in on a weary, sweaty horse, she had been dead several hours.
The doctor slapped his forehead and turned away, his black kit on the desk, the new medicines bulging in his coat pocket. Only the nun was there, in the darkened living room, to see his despair. For a long time they sat there together, saying little.
While the nun fussed with Caterina's hair, Raul sat in the easy chair and listened to Angelina sob, her sobbing padded by the thick stone walls of her room and heavy doors. Something in her had snapped: she said it was the end: she meant, he thought, that she would never see Caterina again: as for him, he felt he would find his child someday; and yet he asked the question: Where? Just now she would not hopscotch in the patio, squeeze his hand during Mass, fill his pipe, dash to meet him after a full day in the hacienda campo, giggle at supper. Sitting stiffly, watching Carmela arrange Caterina's hair, he tried to deny weariness. He felt as if he had ridden horseback for days. He prayed to St. Catherine, remembering how lovingly they had christened the child in her honor.
Suddenly his wife ceased sobbing; the nun left the room; a door closed; the ramrod of silence jabbed him. Death was silence. Sitting erect, he observed a cinch strap of blackbirds over the stable roof where the eucalyptus had crashed. Strange they flew silently. Blackbirds were hacendado birds: he had often thought of them that way: they were the black plunderers. Rapacious, yet not so rapacious as the owl.
Without glancing at Caterina, he walked out, walked down the stairs blindly, asking himself whether he had attended to civilities, telegrams to be sent from the Colima office, a notice for the Colima paper, the casket, the grave prepared. His hand on the wrought-iron railing, he sensed his own mortality....
What was life for?