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it was she wanted out of the sheer pleasure of talking to her son and hearing her own voice. When it seemed she had no further instructions to give, Lídia called out:
    â€œDona Carmen!”
    â€œ
¿Quién me llama?
Ah,
buenos días,
Dona Lídia!”
    â€œGood morning. Would you mind asking Henriquinho to get me something from the grocer’s too? I need some tea . . .”
    She told him what sort of tea and sent a twenty-escudo note fluttering down to him. Henriquinho set off at a run down the street as if pursued by a pack of dogs. Lídia thanked Dona Carmen, who answered in her own strange idiolect, alternating Spanish and Portuguese words and murdering the latter in the process. Lídia, who preferred not to show herself for too long at her window, said goodbye. Henriquinho returned shortly afterward, red-faced from running, to bring her the packet of tea and her change. She thanked him with a ten-tostão tip and a kiss, and the boy left.
    With her cup full and a plate of biscuits beside her, Lídia returned to bed. While she ate, she continued reading the book she had taken from a small cupboard in the dining room. This is how she filled the emptiness of her idle days: reading novels, some good, some bad. At the moment she was immersed in the foolish, inconsequential world of
The Maias.
She sipped her tea and nibbled on the biscuits while she read the passage in which Maria Eduarda is flattering Carlos with her declaration: “Not only my heart remained asleep, but my body too, it was always cold, cold as marble.” Lídia liked that image. She looked for a pencil so that she could underline it, but, unable to find one, she got up and, still holding the book, went over to the dressing table, where she found a lipstick with which she made a mark in the margin, a red line highlighting that moment of drama or perhaps farce.
    From the stairs came the sound of someone sweeping. Then she heard Dona Carmen begin a mournful song, accompanied, in the background, by the continuing clatter of the sewing machine and the sole of a shoe being hammered into place.
    Taking another delicate bite of a biscuit, Lídia resumed her reading.

2
    In the living room, the weary old clock—inherited by Justina after the death of her parents—gave a long, asthmatic wheeze followed by nine nasal chimes. The apartment was so quiet it seemed uninhabited. Justina wore felt-soled shoes and moved from room to room as subtly as a ghost. She and the apartment were so perfectly matched that, seeing them together, one could understand at once why they were as they were. Justina could exist only in that apartment, and the bare, silent apartment could not be as it was without Justina’s presence. A smell of mold emanated from both furniture and floor, and a musty aroma hung in the air. The permanently closed windows contributed to the tomb-like atmosphere, and Justina was so slow and lackadaisical that the house was never entirely clean.
    The vibrations from the chimes—which had temporarily driven out the silence—slowly died away, ever more tenuous and distant. Justina turned out all the lights, then went and sat by the window that gave onto the street. She liked sitting there, motionless, vacant, her hands lying limp in her lap, her eyes open to the darkness, waiting for what? Even she did not know. The cat, her sole companion in the evenings, came and curled up at her feet. He was a quiet creature with questioning eyes and a sinuous gait, and appeared to have lost the ability to meow. He had learned silence from his mistress and, like her, surrendered himself to it.
    Time slipped slowly by. The tick-tock of the clock kept nudging the silence, trying to shoo it away, but the silence resisted with its dense, heavy mass, in which all sounds drowned. Both fought unremittingly on, the ticking clock with the obstinacy of despair and the certain knowledge of death, while the silence had on its side