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glued to her thighs (she was not dressed properly for the weather) and suddenly a desire to turn around, to go back to the familiar city. At the center of the desolate bridge the ragged woman with black straight hair waited with something fixed and anxious in the lined face, in the folding of the hands, a little closed but already outstretched. Alina was close to her, repeating,now she knew, facial expressions and distances as if after a dress rehearsal. Without foreboding, liberating herself at last—she believed it in one terrible, jubilant, cold leap—she was beside her and also stretched out her hands, refusing to think, and the woman on the bridge hugged her against her chest and the two, stiff and silent, embraced one another on the bridge with the crumbling river hammering against the abutments.
    Alina ached: it was the clasp of the pocketbook, the strength of the embrace had run it in between her breasts with a sweet, bearable laceration. She surrounded the slender woman feeling her complete and absolute within her arms, with a springing up of happiness equal to a hymn, to loosing a cloud of pigeons, to the river singing. She shut her eyes in the total fusion, declining the sensations from outside, the evening light; suddenly very tired but sure of her victory, without celebrating it as so much her own and at last.
    It seemed to her that one of the two of them was weeping softly. It should have been her because she felt her cheeks wet, and even the cheekbone aching as though she had been struck there. Also the throat, and then suddenly the shoulders, weighed down by innumerable hardships. Opening her eyes (perhaps now she screamed) she saw that they had separated. Now she did scream. From the cold, because the snow was coming in through her broken shoes, because making her way along the roadway to the plaza went Alina Reyes, very lovely in her grey suit, her hair a little loose against the wind, not turning her face. Going off.

THE IDOL OF THE CYCLADES

    “I t strikes me the same whether you listen to me or not,” Somoza said. “That’s how it is, and it seems only fair to me that you know that.”
    Morand was startled, as though he’d come back from very far off. He remembered that before he’d been drowsing in a half-dream, it had occurred to him that Somoza was going crazy.
    “Forgive me, I was distracted for a moment,” he said. “Will you concede that all this … Anyway, to get here and find you in the middle of …”
    But that Somoza was going crazy, to take that for granted was too easy.
    “That’s right, there are no words for it,” Somoza said. “At least in our words.”
    They looked at one another for a second, and Morand was the first to avert his eyes while Somoza’s voice rose again in that impersonal tone typical of these explanations which, the next moment, went beyond all intelligibility. Morand chose not to look at him, but then fell again into a helpless contemplation of the small statue set upon the column, and it was like a return to that golden afternoon of cigar smoke and the smell of herbs when, incredibly, Somoza and he had dug her up out of the island. He remembered how Teresa, a few yards off stretched out on a boulder from which she was trying to make out the coastline of Paros, had whirled around hearing Somoza’s cry, and after a second’s hesitation had run toward them, forgetting that she had the upper half of her red bikini in her hand. She had leaned over the excavation out of which Somoza’s hand sprang with the statuette almost unrecognizable under its moldiness and chalk deposits, until Morand, angry and laughing at the same moment, yelled at her to cover herself, and Teresa stood up staring at him as if she had not understood, suddenly turned her back on them and hid her breasts between her hands while Somoza handed the statuette up to Morand and jumped out of the pit. Nearly without transition Morand remembered the hours that followed, the night in the big