For the first months I wrote in my own hand, but now I grow tired after a few lines and I prefer dictating to you. My handwriting resembles fly tracks, but yours, Isabel, is fine, and elegant. You like the brown oxide ink, a novelty from Spain that I have trouble reading, but since you are doing me the favor of helping, I can’t impose my black inkwell on you. We would move along more quickly if you did not waylay me with so many questions, child. I love to hear you. You speak the singsong, gliding Spanish of Chile. Rodrigo and I no longer try to instill in your speech the harsh h sounds and lisping th of Spain. That is how Bishop González de Marmolejo spoke, since he was from Seville. He died long ago; do you remember him? He loved you like a grandfather, poor old man. At the last he admitted to being seventy-seven, although he reminded me of a biblical patriarch of a hundred, with his white beard and the way he was constantly predicting the Apocalypse, a quirk he acquired in his old age.
