barren. Unless, of course, this is just the result of overly impressionable sensibilities, Marta because she is pregnant, Marcal because Marta is pregnant, Cipriano Algor for all the reasons we already know and some that only he knows. Anyway, father kissed daughter, daughter kissed father, and they made a bit of a fuss of Found too when he tried to join in, so he will have no reason for complaint either. And that, as they say, is that. Cipriano Algor went into the pottery to start making the molds for the next three hundred figurines, and Marta, in the shade of the mulberry tree, beneath the conscientious eye of Found, who had resumed his responsibilities as guard, prepared herself to start painting the Eskimos. Alas, she could not, she had forgotten that first she had to sand them down, remove any sharp edges, any irregularities or imperfections in the finish, then clean off the dust, and, since misfortunes never come singly and since one omission usually reminds you of another, she would not be able to paint them as she had at first thought, moving seamlessly from one color to the next, until the last brush stroke. She remembered the page in the manual where it explicitly stated that only when one color has completely dried should you apply the next, Now I really could do with an assembly line, she said, with the figurines passing before me, once to receive the blue, then the yellow, then the violet, then the black and the red and the green and the white, and, of course, for the final blessing, the one that carries within it all the colors of the rainbow, May God make you good, for I have done what I could, and it won't be so much because of any additional goodness that God, as subject as any ordinary mortal to lapses and oversights, may contribute to crown my efforts, but because of a humble awareness that the reason we didn't do any better was simply because we couldn't. Arguing with what must be has always been a waste of time, as far as what must be is concerned, arguments are more or less random groups of words waiting to be placed in a syntactical order that will give them a sense they themselves are not entirely sure that they have. Marta left Found to keep an eye on the dolls and, declining all further debates with the inevitable, she went into the kitchen to get the only bit of fine sandpaper in the house, This won't last long, she thought, I'll have to buy some more. If she had looked round the door of the pottery, she would have seen that things were not going well in there either. Cipriano Algor had boasted to Marcal that he had invented a few shortcuts to speed up the work, which, from, shall we say, a global perspective, was true, but speed had soon proved itself to be incompatible with perfection, and produced a far larger number of defective dolls than had been the case with the first batch. When Marta went back to her work, the first spoiled figurines had already been placed on the shelf, but Cipriano Algor, having calculated time gained and figurines lost, decided not to give up his fecund, but, on the other hand, neither reprehensible nor ever fully explained shortcuts. And so the days passed. The Eskimos were followed by the clowns, then came the nurses, then the mandarins and the bearded Assyrians, and finally the jesters, who had been placed along the back wall of the kiln. On the second day, Marta had gone down to the village to buy two dozen sheets of sandpaper. This was the shop where Isaura had just started work, as Marta already knew, having visited Isaura after the latter's troubling encounter, emotionally speaking, of course, with Marta's father. These two women do not see each other very often, but there are plenty of reasons for them to become great friends. Discreetly, so that her words did not reach the ears of the owner of the shop, Marta asked Isaura if she was settling into the job, and Isaura said yes, she was, I'll get used to it, she said. She spoke without any show of pleasure, but firmly, as if she wanted to make it clear that pleasure had nothing to do with it, that it had been will, and will alone, that had made her accept the job. Marta remembered the words that Isaura had spoken some time ago, Any job will do, as long as I can go on living here. In the question that Isaura asked next, while she was rolling up the sheets of sandpaper, loosely, as prescribed, Marta heard an echo, distorted but still recognizable, of those words, And how's everyone at home, Oh, tired, working very hard, but pretty well really, Marcal, poor thing, had to stoke the kiln on his day off, his back is probably killing him now. The sheets of sandpaper had been rolled up. While she was taking the money and returning the change, Isaura, without looking up, asked, And how's your father. Marta could say only that her father was fine, an anxious thought had just flashed through her mind, What will this woman do with her life when we leave. Isaura said good-bye, she had to serve another customer, Give him my regards, she said, and if, at that moment, Marta had asked her, What will you do with your life when we leave, she would perhaps have replied as calmly as she had before, I'll get used to it. Yes, we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I'll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance, because there really isn't any other way, at least none has yet been discovered, of expressing in as dignified a way as possible our sense of resignation, what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things. Marta left the shop almost in tears. With a kind of desperate remorse, as if she were accusing herself of having deceived Isaura, she was thinking, She has no idea, she doesn't even know that we're about to leave.
Twice they forgot to give the dog his food. Recollecting his days as an indigent, when hope for the morrow was all the food he had after many hours spent with his stomach longing for sustenance, Found did not complain, instead, neglecting his duties as guard dog, he simply lay down beside the kennel, for it is ancient knowledge that a prone body can withstand hunger far longer, waiting patiently until one of his owners struck his or her head and exclaimed, Oh, damn, we've forgotten about the dog. It is hardly surprising, since, during that time, they had almost forgotten about themselves. But it was thanks to that total absorption in their respective tasks and to the hours stolen from their sleep, even though Cipriano Algor kept telling Marta, You must rest, you must rest, it was thanks to that parallel effort that, when the time came for Cipriano Algor to go and pick up his son-in-law from the Center again, the three hundred figurines that had emerged from the kiln were sanded, brushed, painted, and dried, every single one of them, and that the other three hundred, erect and impeccable in their raw clay, with no visible defects, were also, with the help of the heat and the breeze, perfectly dry and ready to be fired. The pottery seemed to be resting after a great labor, the silence had lain down to sleep. In the shade of the mulberry tree, father and daughter looked at the six hundred figurines lined up on the shelves and it seemed to them that they had done an excellent job. Cipriano Algor said, I won't work in the pottery tomorrow, that way Marcal won't have to deal with the kiln all alone, and Marta said, I think we should rest for a few days before we launch into the second batch, and Cipriano Algor said, What about three days, and Marta replied, It's better than nothing, and Cipriano Algor asked, How are you feeling, and Marta said, Tired, but well, and Cipriano Algor said, I feel great, and Marta said, That must be what we call the reward of a job well done. Although it might not seem like it, there was no irony in these words, only a weariness that could be described as infinite if such a description were not a manifestly wild exaggeration. Whatever it was, it was not so much the physical tiredness, but having to stand helplessly by, unable to do anything, watching her father's bitter disappointment and ill-concealed sadness, his ups and downs, his pathetic attempts to appear confident and authoritative, the obsessive, categorical restating of his doubts as if, by doing so, he could remove them from his head. And then there was that woman, Isaura, Isaura Madruga, she of the water jug, to whom she had replied only, He's fine, to the question Isaura had murmured, eyes lowered, while she was counting out the change, And how's your father when what she should have done was to take her by the arm, march her to the pottery where her father was working and say, Here he is, and then close the door and leave them inside until words came to their rescue, because silences, poor things, are just that, silences, everyone knows how often even apparently eloquent silences have given rise to mistaken interpretations, with serious and sometimes fatal consequences. We're too fearful, too cowardly to risk doing something like that, thought Marta, looking at her father, who seemed to have fallen asleep, we are too caught in the net of so-called proprieties, in the web of what is proper and improper, if anyone found out I had done it, they would immediately come to me and say that throwing a woman at a man like that, because that's the expression they would use, shows a complete lack of respect for another person's identity, that it was an act of irresponsible imprudence, after all, who knows what might happen to them in the future, people's happiness is not something that we can build today with any certainty that it will still be there tomorrow, later on, we might meet one disunited half of the couple we had united and risk hearing them say, It was all your fault. Marta did not want to give in to that commonsense argument, the logical and skeptical result of many hard battles with life, It's ridiculous to throw away the present just because you're afraid there might not be a future, she said to herself, adding, Besides, not everything will necessarily happen tomorrow, some things will happen only the day after tomorrow, What did you say, asked her father abruptly, Nothing, she said, I've just been sitting here quietly so as not to wake you, But I wasn't asleep, Well, I thought you were, You said that there are some things that will happen only the day after tomorrow, How odd, did I really say that, asked Marta, Yes, I wasn't dreaming it, Then I must have dreamed it, I must have fallen asleep and then immediately woken up again, that's what dreams are like, you can make neither head nor tail of them, not because they don't have a head and a tail, but because the head and the tail aren't where you expect them to be, which is why dreams are so hard to interpret. Cipriano Algor got up, It's nearly time to go and pick up Marcal, but I was just thinking that perhaps it would be a good idea to go a bit earlier and drop in at the buying department to tell them that the first three hundred are ready and to agree on a delivery date, That seems like a good idea, said Marta. Cipriano Algor went to change his clothes, put on a clean shirt and some different shoes, and in less than ten
