It was the eve of the Saturday of Light, and the people, in the vigil of the feast, were making ready for Easter.

The feasts in Latin America are “feasts” in their deep Christian meaning — feasts of worship and of keeping the memory of the Nazarene's birth, His crucifixion, and His passion. The people there do not know the meaning of swagger at feast time; they do not take the holy days as occasions for showing off with volleys of gunfire, or for strutting in displays of heroics, or for rubbing sour grapes into the eyes of the toughs of the other sects.

Easter, there, is reverence, prayer, and worship. The processions move through the streets of the city with flowers and incense, in silence; and the great men of the state — pres-idents, ministers, judges, deputies, physicians — walk bareheaded, escorting the memorial bier. And whenever the procession reaches a quarter of the city, it halts before the house of a lady known for piety and virtue; and there stands a platform which a girl mounts, representing the Magdalene... a slender figure draped in black, long fair hair, and a sweet, angelic voice chanting passages of the most beautiful things the genius of Italy's artists has poured forth in lament of the greatest love for the greatest Beloved.

•

It was the eve of the Saturday of Light.

And I lay on a bed in the Matarazzo hospital, while there gnawed at my patience, my endurance, my powers of resistance — and at my wish that my body be eaten one day by the worms of Lebanon, not the worms of the emigrant lands — a low, witless fever, unending, obstinate, of the kind that the germs of the well

water in the far villages of the Borór bestow upon people's bodies.

I had no cause to complain of exile in Brazil, where I had whole fam-ilies of kinsfolk who loved me and doted on me, and women friends who surrounded me with every

kind of care. I had no cause to complain of isolation and desolation in Brazil, where I had five cousins with whom I had been reared in one house; I had carried the youngest of them in my arms, and their memory was mingled with all the memories of my girlhood and my first youth... And when I was stricken by my brother's murder, they closed around me — a mass of hearts that pitied and showed mercy, that grieved with me and consoled me.

I was entering the hospital for the third time, and I was weighed down — beyond the illness — by the trouble I had brought upon my own people. I remembered that we were on the eve of the feast, and that my cousin would leave the affairs of her house and her children and come to visit me; so I dragged myself to where the telephone was, asked for the number, and said:

— Adla! Adloul! God be with you, cousin. I am well. Don't come to me today. No! Don't leave your house, God bless you. Come tomor-row, or the day after; but today

you will be doing me a kindness if you do not come.

I went back to my room with her voice in my ears. It seemed to me that in her voice were gathered all the voices of the quarter where I grew up: the voices of the birds waking at dawn, the roar of the waves in the middle of the night, the voices of my mother and my brothers and my daughter...

I took to my bed, one memory and another paining me, memories of tragedy upon tragedy tightening about my throat, while outside the rains poured down like the waters of brooks and streams.

•

In the room I had occupied when I entered the hospital the second time there was an icon of Jesus, very like our icons in the East. I used to take comfort in it, gazing at it long and addressing my secret confidences to the spirit of Him it portrayed — especially on one night when my condition worsened and I thought myself going... When I returned to the hospital for the third time, the Italian bene-factress, Signora Matarazzo, who oversaw the hospital's affairs, had replaced these icons with modern statuettes of the new porcelain manufacture. My share, in my room, was a small statuette of a beautiful woman with eyebrows lifted toward the temples, eyes that followed the brows in their upward slant, and cheeks and an upturned nose on which the artist had tried to confer the beauty of the cinema girls. I hated that statuette, and I kept telling Sister Susanna to bring me the old-style icon of Jesus from room 264; she would answer that the old icons had all been taken down and replaced by these statuettes — then she would laugh

and say: We must become “à la mode.”

That week the tender-hearted