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the library, when he was alone and turned red if Inés came in to ask him something, to offer him something, because Manuel had told her to, a cup of tea or a drink. He always listened, very silent, solicitous, and stayed very late conversing with Utrera, with Manuel, with Medina, the doctor, and with brief questions, with silences that contained the questions he didn't always dare to ask, he tried to have the conversation gravitate to Jacinto Solana, to his profiled shadow, elusive and laconic like his gaze in the photographs, like the dedications to Mariana or Manuel in some of the books in the library, on some postcards sent from Paris in 1930, from Moscow in 1935, in December.
    He writes in his bedroom, Inés said as she undressed, first pulling off her blue tights, dazzling the semidarkness of the room with her white thighs, her white feet, the pink heels numb with cold, and after taking off her skirt she got into bed and sat on it, covering herself to the waist, her icy feet in the deepest part of the sheets, and then, when she removed the red wool sweater, her head disappeared for an instant and emerged again, beautiful and disheveled, to submerge completely, up to her chin, lying still and shivering, unveiling one hand to toss her bra and shirt to the floor, naked now, clinging, pushing her knees forward, her thighs, with her eyes closed, as if feeling her way, her skin cool and then warm, her small breasts, the brush of nipples hardened by the cold and then soft again and pink and docile to the caress or slow bite that she confirmed, still without the assistance of sight, so that when her eyes opened she, Inés, would be recovered and close, intact, breaking free of the embrace, bending her long body that lay in the dark corner of the sheets that had to be moved away to see her whole, the brief, smooth pubis between closed thighs, the angular, raised hips, and when the hand moved down until the fingertips felt the straight, wet cleft, that touch, like a countersign, advised of the transition to the celebration of odors, deep salty vagina and delicate breath and mouth that sometimes closed pink and wet and a smile of thin lips pressed tight that was the candid, wise smile of happiness and rest.
    "But he stops talking when I come in, and he looks at me a lot, almost never in the eye, he looks at me when I turn my back, but I see him watching me in mirrors," she said, laughing only with her lips, certain of her body, grateful to it in a way that excluded adolescence and chance. For Minaya she had prepared the room located to the left of the parlor, symmetrical with the empty bedroom of Manuel and Mariana, and on the first night, when he went down to the library after bathing, Inés examined his suitcase and his books and the papers he had put in the desk, and when she opened the closet she confirmed her suspicion that the recent arrival had no suit other than the one he was wearing. Then she went to the courtyard, hovering near the half-opened library door, pretending to clean the paintings or the tiles, but then Utrera appeared, back from the café, and he began to ask her things about Minaya in his slow, drunkard's voice, what he was like, what time he had arrived, where he was now, brushing against her body in a siege either casual or cowardly, so close she could smell his breath rotten with tobacco and cognac. Utrera, who didn't go into the library because he couldn't walk a straight line and his hands were trembling, looked at her for the last time, not at her face but at her hips and belly, and then he disappeared into the depths of the house, no doubt to shut himself inside the carriage house where he had his studio, or what he called his studio, because in all the years Inés had been in Manuel's service, the old man hadn't done anything but carve a Saint Anthony for a village church and repeat to the point of satiety a series of Romanesque-looking figures that he sold regularly to a furniture