"It's coming," she called to me, pointing at the almost motionless column of smoke bending over the tops of the olive trees, and then she turned toward me smoothing her hair and the skirt that had revealed her knees for a delicious moment, but the smile on her lips now was no longer mine, and her impatience for the arrival of the train carrying Orlando was an affront very similar to the uneasiness of jealousy. I hated the train and I hated Orlando, because they were coming to decapitate my being alone with her, they were emissaries of the time that would snatch her away from me and the future hours when her absence would destroy me. Stripped of will, of resignation, of pride, I consisted of nothing but two yearning eyes that looked at Mariana, and consciousness of the last respite that had venomously been granted to my imagination. She was already leaving, although she seemed immobile, I felt her becoming lost as slowly as the hands of a clock or a train that begins its departure in silence slipping away toward the red lights in the darkness, and when the second whistle sounded and I saw the column of smoke coming closer, the empty station, the indolent quiet of the May morning, were suddenly the landscape of a desert island where I had been abandoned and left alone, looking at the clock that pointed to noon, calculating the place and destination of my next flight, not going more than three days into the future because beyond that time limit nothing would remain.
