Framed in this napkin, which is knotted over the skull in her woolly gray hair, the face looks like a hook-nosed mask of green bronze, with a vitrified line of eyes; the knees make two sharp summits under the sheet; one's eyes run along the thin rods of the shins and the feet lift the linen like two in-driven nails.
Slowly Marie prepares to go.

She has closed the neck of her dress and hidden herself in her cloak.

She comes up to me, sore-hearted, and with her tears for a moment quenched she smiles at me without speaking.
I half rise, my hands tremble towards her smile as if to touch it, above the past and the dust of my second mother.
Towards the end of the night, when the dead fire is scattering chilliness, the women go away one by one.

One hour, two hours, I remain alone.

I pace the room in one direction and another, then I look, and shiver.