GARDEN

Bárbara set her pallid face against the thick iron bars and looked through them. Automobiles painted green and yellow, clean-shaven men and smiling women streamed by very close, in a bright parade cut into equal segments by the interlacing shafts of wrought-iron fence. In the background was the sea.

Bárbara turned slowly and entered through the avenue of pines.

A great light coming from some undefined point projected strange shadows across the pathways of the great garden.

It was the shadow of the shriveled trees and mutilated statues all along the road, half obliterated in the grass.

Her dress became caught in a rosebush, and the roses were cold. The grey moon appeared, up above the house.

The whitewashed walls gleamed, rectangular and symmetrical; the roses gleamed.

And she, too, gleamed in a dense clarity of mirrors.

And then, suddenly, the moon began to tremble, more and more quickly, more and more fiercely, and the shadows of things swirled back and forth, and Bárbara stood still and looked up above. The moon was pulling loose; was rending the clouds and plunging to earth, turning cartwheels through space.

A minute passed, a century passed. The moon bounced off the balcony gable with a sound of breaking glass, to land in pieces in the garden at Bárbara's feet.

Splinters of moon splattered her face, and she could still feel the unfamiliar cold.

She knelt on the path, gathered up the broken moon from the grass, and wrapped it in her lace shawl.

For a while she held it in her hands, mistress for a few seconds of the secret of Night. Then she dug a deep hole in the place where the earth was warmest... And so, she buried the moon in the garden.

Above it she planted an almond-tree branch and she went away with her hands damp and muddy with earth and with moon.

Outside, the green and yellow automobiles passed by...