appearance was frail; her hair and eyes were brown, she was rather thin, and very distinguished, her skin was golden, her lips the color of fresh blood. Beneath the skin on her face there were fine veins that radiated in concentric circles from the bridge of her nose. There were moments when these veins were paler, to the point of fading and disappearing altogether. Then they returned to throb gently and darken her serious features. All at once she smiled, and Alejandro saw that she was smiling at Clara.
Turning to one side, he looked at the young woman and she took his breath away. She was smiling back at Maria; in her smile, he saw compassion and sisterly love, and his own passion was heightened still further. Now he knew that he would have to pray late into the night, no longer to die in honor, but that this flame would not fall to the enemy—how could I bear its loss? he pondered, and thought less of what he was feeling than of what Clara incarnated. And this was how Alejandro de Yepes, in his thirtieth year, was awakened to love. Neither the self-sacrifice of combat, nor the pledge to shed his blood down to the last drop, nor allegiance to the land of his ancestors, nor Luis’s poetry, nor Miguel’s ideas had ever shown him the way so clearly, and if he’d thought he was close to it when he stood before his dead, what was always missing was the echo of a sigh. Now the fact that he’d always taken and never given seemed so obvious to him that shame rose to his cheeks. He’d already sensed this, briefly, in the cellar, when he felt that he loved because he felt uplifted. But the smile Clara had given Maria tore like a raging wind at the last ties binding him to his former life, while he clung to the yearning to give with which she filled him, a yearning that was transforming the parameters of his heart one by one. Now he understood Luis’s lesson, the restlessness that comes from enthusiasm when passion has the power to bathe us in calm waters: this passion had made him cease to notice whether Clara was beautiful—never diminishing his desire for all that.
The delegation from the alliance of humans and elves, now a few steps away, came to a halt. Close up, the beauty of the elves was almost unbearable. It emanated from the perfection of human and animal forms commingled in their slow choreography of mutations, but also from the manner in which the elves expressed their emotions, in the form of faint emanations that traced drawings in space—and, whether it was pride, sadness, weariness, goodness, mischief, or courage, a symphony of ethereal sketches was created, intelligible in the way that abstract paintings are intelligible, and this made their deepest hearts transparent to humans. Alejandro looked at Petrus and was stunned by the etchings which the only alcoholic squirrel in the civilized world was sending out in the air in leaping bursts. There was courage there, candor and obstinacy, irreverence flirting with ribaldry, but also a procession of juvenile aspirations bathed in ancient wisdom, in such a way that, through this consensus of lightness and depth, Petrus the minor elf actually appeared to be great.
“Am I seeing things, or do they have their heart written on their brow?” murmured Jesús.
Then the two men got down on one knee to greet the elves from the land of mists and their human companions.
Jesús Rocamora, as he bent his knee, got the impression that he was returning to a semblance of reality. The stone was lukewarm, and he liked the trembling of organic life. The first minutes had been a succession of shocks: the absence of colors, for a start, the young brown-haired woman, then at last the elves themselves, in all their fantastical multiplicity. Now that he was getting used to the black sky and the trimorphic creatures, the true impact of the change of worlds became clear to him.
“Welcome to Nanzen,” said Maria.
She had a deep voice that evoked some elusive memory. For an unknown reason, he recalled his only encounter with Luis Álvarez, during the second year of the war—their one brief meeting, in a January of endless frost and exhausted soldiers. At the end, Luis had recited three lines to him. While some men are not cut out for words, that doesn’t mean they cannot be found by a