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seeing anything. He was in his thoughts.
    The savagery of children, he was thinking.
    We have turned over the earth so violently that we have reawakened the savagery of children.
    He looked back at the woman. She was looking at him.
    He heard her voice saying:
    “Is it true that they called you Tito?”
    The man nodded yes.
    “Had you ever met my father before?”
    “ . . . ”
    “ . . . ”
    “I knew who he was.”
    “Is it true that you were the first to shoot him?”
    The man shook his head.
    “What difference does it make . . . ”
    “You were twenty. You were the youngest. You had been fighting for only a year. El Gurre treated you like a son.”
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    Then the woman asked if he remembered.
    The man stared at her. And only in that instant, finally, did he see again, in her face, the face of that child, lying there, impeccable and right, perfect. He saw those eyes in these, and that extraordinary strength in the calm of this tired beauty. The child: she had turned and looked at him. The child: now she was there. How dizzying time can be. Where am I? the man wondered. Here or there?
    Have I ever been in a moment that was not this one?
    The man said that he remembered. That he had done nothing else, for years, but remember everything.
    “For years I asked myself what I ought to do. But the truth is that I never was able to tell anyone. I never told anyone that you were there, that night. You may not believe it, but it’s so. At first, obviously, I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. But time passed, and it became something else. No one thought about the war anymore. People wanted to look ahead, they no longer cared about what had happened. It all seemed to be buried forever. I began to think that it was better to forget everything. Let it go.
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    At a certain point, however, it emerged that Roca’s daughter was alive, she was hidden somewhere, in a village in the south. I didn’t know what to think. It seemed to me incredible that she had come out of that inferno alive, but with children you can never say. Finally someone saw the girl and swore that it was really her. So I realized that I would never be free of that night. Neither I nor the others. Naturally I began to ask myself what she might have seen and heard. And if she could remember my face.
    Who can know what happens in the mind of a child, con-fronted by something like that. Adults have a memory, and a sense of justice, and often they have a taste for revenge. But a child? For a while I convinced myself that nothing would happen. But then Salinas died. In that strange way.”
    The woman was listening to him, motionless.
    He asked if she wanted him to go on.
    “Go on,” she said.
    “It came out that Uribe had something to do with it.”
    The woman looked at him without expression. Her lips were half closed.
    60

    “It may have been a coincidence, but certainly it was odd. Little by little everyone was persuaded that the child knew something. It’s difficult to understand now, but those were strange times. The country was going forward, beyond the war, at an incredible speed, forgetting everything. But there was a whole world that had never emerged from the war, and was unable to fit in with that happy land. I was one of those. We all were. For us nothing had ended. And that child was a danger. We talked about it a lot. The fact is that the death of Salinas didn’t go down with anyone. So finally it was decided that some-how the child should be eliminated. I know it seems madness, but in reality it was all very logical: terrible, and logical. They decided to eliminate her and charged the Count of Torrelavid to do it.”
    The man paused. He looked at his hands. It was as if he were putting his memories in order.
    “He was a man who had been a double agent for the whole war. He worked for them, but he was one of us. He went to Uribe and asked him if he would rather spend his life in jail for the murder of Salinas or vanish into nothing