The narrator said:

In my friend Octavio's strange talk, on that Christmas Eve, there was a great deal of whiskey and a little truth.

And today, because it is Christmas Eve, and because I have met him again with a pale creature, colorless — indeed, like the dress she was wearing and like the scent she had perfumed herself with —

today the memory of Octavio comes back to me, and the memory of our drunkenness in that noisy bar; I remember his necktie, knotted in a way that gave him the look of a vagabond despite the fineness of his suit and the elegance of his movements.

In those days I was drowning the pain of a great love in the depths of the glass, trying to pour out my torments to my friends; and, faced with their indifference, I would choke down my grief and live alone with my misery.

And on that Christmas Eve I was glad of Octavio, for he came to my table with a glass of iced whiskey in his hand, and I burst out talking of my wretchedness over Albertina, my classmate at the university — of the smallness of her body and the narrowness of her mind, of her mannish movements and the enchantment of her mouth, of my calamity in that love whose roots were fixed fast in my heart, and of her intelligence, for were it not for that turbulent, agitated mind of hers she would have stood in the ranks of the asses! I was rambling and contradicting myself until my friend stopped me and took over the conversation.

At first I despaired at the opportunity slipping from my hand, but my friend's tale took hold of me. Yes — I lived a whole night inside that tale, and turned away from the pretty girls flitting among us, their bosoms hovering above our heads as they changed the glasses and wiped the tables; I turned away from the piano and guitar players and from the Christmas carols sung by a company of drunken Germans.

And he told me his story:

We married — as you know — a love match. Marusia and I were both twenty-three. She was a musician, and I practiced literature, and we settled in a lovely house in the suburbs. When my first book came out the critics hailed it, for the literature of the leftists stirred people in those days, and I was an extremist.

We lived happily on music and literature. I would forget myself and forget mealtimes over an article or a new chapter; and to open the art of music to me she would play and interpret for me what escaped me, and laugh at me. I still hear and see her laugh to this hour: it begins between the eyebrows, descends to her nose, to her chin, and at the last breaks open upon her mouth. No one in the world laughs as she did. Her hands — even her fingertips — laughed!

No, she had no like, and the force of life in her had no equal. And when I passed my hand over her full eyelids I would say, teasing:

Marusia — from your head to your feet you are truly a beating heart.

And she would say: I am only a small animal pulsing with life.

She was a gathering of harmonious colors: from the green of her eyes to the flame of her gilded hair, to those thick chestnut lashes, to that skin like a ripe, appetizing fruit.

We needed no one — not even children; and whenever we spoke of those small creatures and their problems, she would take refuge in gravity and then say:

— No one shall come between us. Never, never!!

I do not believe any two spouses were ever as happy as we were, through a stretch that lasted six years, during which I published two books and grew sure of myself, and Marusia became something fastened to me and completing me. I never saw a woman more feminine than she. She was in truth one of Adam's ribs: while she was afraid of a lizard, she would cross a desert to bring me a cup of water.

She was the woman who works her way, day by day, deeper into a man's heart, gathering in her body strength and weakness together — she was the female! She knew how to make herself small and to shrink, so as to win an ideal life inside our hearts.

And so Marusia took possession of my nerves and my blood and my bones; and when she went, after an illness that lasted a year, I became like a man maimed and amputated. She did not die the hour they lowered her into the earth. She died from the very onset of her illness, and that ghost which spent a year wandering the corners of the house, begging