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boy.
    It’s raining. So much the better; no one will dare make the trip up to the cabin in such unsettled weather. I’ve managed to catch two of the cows. One of them has mastitis. I’ll have to kill her to stop her suffering. Today the child ate three times.
Page 8
    Today I buried Elena under a beech tree. It’s less robust than the oak. The sound of the earth falling on her mingled with the smell of her decomposing body. I was reduced to such bitter tears that for a moment I felt sure I was going to die too. But dying is not contagious. Defeat is. And I feel I am transmitting that particular epidemic. Wherever I go there will be the stench of defeat. Defeat killed Elena, and it will be the death of my son, whom I have not yet named. I lost a war and Elena, whom nobody could ever have considered an enemy, has died defeated. My son, our son, who is not even aware he was conceived with the flames of fear all around him, will die, mortally wounded by defeat.
    I placed a big white stone on her grave. I didn’t write her name on it, because I know that if any angels still exist, they will recognise Elena’s kindly soul among a whole host of other kindly souls.
    I’m trying to recall some of Garcilaso’s verses to recite over your tomb, Elena, but I no longer have any recollection of them. How did they go?
    There are several failed attempts to write the poem, all of them crossed out. The only lines that are legible are the following:
    Take these tears which on ground so bare
    I shed today as so often in the past
    although they may not help you there,
    until that dark and eternal night
    closes these eyes that saw you last
    and brings me new and brighter sight.
Page 9
    I don’t know why I’m writing this notebook. And yet I’m glad I brought it with me. If I had someone to talk to, I probably would not write it; Iderive a certain morbid pleasure when I think that somebody will read it after they have found my dead son and I. I’ve put a stone marker on Elena’s grave so that the sense of remorse will be threefold, even though the time for pity is past. It’s very cold now. Soon it will start to snow, and then all the paths up to the cabin will be cut off. I’ll have the whole winter to decide what death we are to die from. Yes, I think the time for pity has gone.
Page 10
    In the margin are several roughly-drawn faces, obviously meant to be portraits. Three of them show the face of a child, and two that of a woman – the same woman in both cases. There are sketches of old people, both men and women, some of them wearing berets, others with scarves tied round their necks. There’s also a dog, pictured complete. Underneath all these drawings is the phrase: What graves are you lying in now?
    The sick cow lows plaintively. Its milk has dried up. I don’t dare kill her yet because I need snowdrifts to build up for me to keep the carcass in. There is plenty of firewood, and I’ll try to feed the other one by digging out grass from under the snow. What worries me most is this pencil. It’s the only one I have, and I want to be able to write everything so that whoever finds us in spring knows how we met our death.
    Written in capitals as if in a printed book, the following phrase: I AM A POET WITH NO VERSES.
Page 11
    Today it snowed all day. These mountains must be where all winters have their home.
    The boy is still alive. The snow round the cabin is like a shroud. The dead cow provides us with meat: I keep some of it smoked, and the rest has been frozen by this early winter weather. Fortunately we get plenty of milk from the living cow, which is now inside the cabin with us. It helps to keep us warm. The sweet potatoes we stole as we went through Perlunes keep perfectly, buried in the snow. To judge by the greedy wayhe drinks the soup I make, the boy seems to like them. What’s surprising is the way he is beginning to fill the space. I can remember when he was an intruder in the cabin, something that should not have