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By Root 1063 0

in the world from the provincial aristocracy to the subproletariat of the capital. She had received her education at the free school run by the Salesian Mothers—for reasons of conscience or as publicity?—next door to their school for paying pupils, and like all her schoolmates had come to suffer from an Argentine complex as she grew up; in her case it took the form of meekness, silence, and gluttony. She had spent her life working as a classroom monitor for the Salesian Mothers, and her vague, undefined status as such—was she a servant? a worker? a salaried employee?—aggravated the servile insecurity that caused her to acquiesce and nod her head like a docile cow in any and every situation. When she was left an orphan at the age of twenty-four, she finally worked up the courage to visit, after much hesitation and painful soul-searching, the matrimonial agency that put her in touch with the man who was to be her lord and master. Due to the lack of erotic experience of both spouses, the consummation of the marriage was an extremely slow process, a serial in which, between false starts and impulses gone astray, fiascos due to faulty aim or precocious emission or the wrong position, the chapters followed one upon the other, the suspense mounted, and the stubborn hymen remained unperforated. Paradoxically, in view of the fact that they were an extremely virtuous couple, Doña Zoila first lost her virginity (not out of vice but due, rather, to mere blind chance and the newlyweds’ lack of practice) heterodoxically; that is to say, sodomitically.

Apart from this fortuitous abomination, the couple’s life had been a model of moral rectitude. Doña Zoila was a conscientious, hardworking, thrifty wife, and doggedly determined to respect her husband’s principles (which certain people chose to call eccentricities). She had never objected, for instance, to Don Federico’s strict injunction against the use of hot water (since, according to him, it sapped one’s will and caused head colds), despite the fact that even after twenty years she still turned purple from the cold on entering the shower. She had never failed to comply with the clause of the family code (unwritten but engraved upon the memory of each of its members) decreeing that no one was to sleep more than five hours a night so as not to encourage indolence, even though their crocodile yawns made the windowpanes quiver when the alarm clock went off every morning at 5 a.m. She had accepted with resignation her husband’s ukase that movies, dancing, theater, radio were to be excluded as permissible forms of family entertainment, on the grounds that they were immoral, and that meals in restaurants, travel, and any sort of fanciful caprice with regard to bodily attire or household furnishings was likewise forbidden as being too great a strain on the budget. It was only with respect to her one sin, gluttony, that she had been incapable of obeying the master of the house. Meat, fish, and rich desserts with whipped cream had very often appeared on the menu. This was the one and only area in his conjugal life in which Don Federico had been unable to impose his will: a strictly vegetarian diet.

But Doña Zoila had never made any attempt to indulge in her vice in secret, behind her husband’s back, and as the latter’s sedan entered the coquettish Miraflores district, he told himself that his wife’s forthrightness in this respect, while it might not have redeemed her sin, made it at most a venial one. When her irrepressible appetites were more powerful than her spirit of obedience, she devoured her beefsteak with onions, or her sole with hot peppers, or her apple pie with whipped cream before his very eyes, her cheeks beet-red with shame, and resigned beforehand to the punishment that would be meted out to her for that particular transgression. She had never objected to the sanctions he imposed. If (on account of a grilled steak or a chocolate bar) Don Federico forbade her to speak for three days, she herself stuffed a gag in her mouth so as not to disobey even in her sleep, and if the penalty