PART FIVE: DISSERENASCIT CHAPTER LI: RAIN OVER THE FURROWS

   How to follow the thread of a story when so far Nike was telling me? Now I must continue with my own forces, but first it is necessary to know what forces I have, if any. So far I have been telling what he has been narrating to me in the bonfires. If now I must continue alone, I’d better imagine that he is still telling me what follows, or Lucy, or Luke or any of them. At least I won't give up without trying.

CHAPTER LII: COMMOTION

   Two years passed. Winds of all colors swept the defenseless city and sometimes passengers were wounded by their breath. A furious hurricane took Aurelién Protch one afternoon. He was already very old and he could no longer repeat his dream of approaching the sea, but he walked every day to Rivers' Meet and a sharp dagger made him bleed with a pneumonia that took him two days later. Richard did not go to the bar for two weeks but phoned Luke and Nike, who immediately knew the news, gave condolences to their head waiter and his entire family; came to his house and later to the funeral. The eight beggars were present, but Paul and Kirsten stayed with their uncle James and their aunt Rosa, who could not go, but already friends, comforted him in private. Gerald was not three so as not to meet his sister. But they were Anne-Marie and Samuel, the now friend and neighbour Nigel Matts and of course his cousin Herbert with his wife. Armand and Crystelle were taciturn, impressively solemn, crying because of the grandfather that they would not see again.

CHAPTER LIII: URGENCY

   The autumn of the year 35 was a puddle of tears and an irrigation channel of fears. It was not easy to overlook a prophecy when the threat becomes imminent physical danger. In a cold waiting room, Lucy was finally filled with apprehension but remained undaunted in the hope that, once something had happened, she would not consider more frightening possibilities, and continued to maintain her faith that her husband would survive. It was difficult to find words with which to persuade Nike, who wept inconsolably.

CHAPTER LIV: THE TREE BEGGAR

   It escaped her. Mr. Graham Fox's Volvo was further and further. She had stopped at some traffic lights and was absorbed with her memories of Europe. Anne-Marie had just returned to work. She had taken some more free days. It was October 4, and meanwhile the company was in the good hands of her dear Joan Weissmann. With green light already, other drivers had to sound their car horns so that she resumed the road. In those moments, she was still in Barcelona, where they had traveled after Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin and before Venice and Prague. She was evoking that coffee in a bar in the Ramblas where finally she did feel shot by the arrows of a small winged God, and finally she loved the one who loved her. Brandon – she sighed-, scratching her heart. But soon she came to her senses and recalled she was trying to hunt Mr. Fox.

CHAPTER LV: HAIL

  ─ "Antares is a red firefly in the midst of the breathtaking starry night sky – Mistress Oakes told Kirsten at James’-, a light bulb which illuminates the solemn black of the south. But according to what John told me, now the sun is the great flashlight that overshadows it. This month we Scorpions celebrate it, but it is the powerful rays of our star which hide it and that’s why now it is not visible. We have to wait for the spring, almost summer."

CHAPTER LVI: LUMINOUS MOMENTS

─ "Dad, where do stars sleep? -Kirsten was resting in a trunk and was curious and asked his father Luke. It was a warm May afternoon of the year 39. She was very close to being nine years old and his brother Paul would be ten - I mean the months when we cannot see them, where do they hide?"

   Luke sensed that his daughter was worried about something other than stars, and did not know if, like them, he could illuminate her.

CHAPTER LVII. GREATNESS

   The hill was dusty, treeless, bald, a paradox in that glory of the lake. Somewhat away from the shore on the north side, the same water which gave life to its neighbouring hills seemed to neglect the scarce shrubs that still resisted in its slopes. There were few trees, but he chose an old elm tree with big shade and sat down to reflect. Armand Protch needed to find himself. He wasn’t sure at all of his future in life and he believed he was old enough to know. It was little more than a month ago that he had been 18 and it was now the end of September of the year 45.

CHAPTER LVIII: WITHOUT STRIDENCY

   I will enter the story without stridency, without false modesty or false pride; I will enter the plot when it is necessary to respect a certain chronological order. Now is the time to reveal myself. I don't know if at this point the reader, if it is I have some readers will have been able to recognize me. I have walked through these pages still shamelessly, because I was not seen, but I've been like my star, dim and not very recognizable but finally "as I don't want my writing to be apocryphal, I have overcome the temptation of anonymity and it will be signed."

CHAPTER LIX: TO OVERWHELM SO AS NOT TO BREAK

Requiem for the flowers and the trees that had dressed the outskirt and now left it bare, lifeless, leaving a trail of dim light in the vicinity of the fire. January of that year 59 wasn't quite cold, but a year began which was frosted on the inside, a withered year, where my brother and I started to find ourselves and as so many times the threshold was an uninhabited and inhospitable clearing.

CHAPTER LX: BEAUTY

   Warm needles that morning twilight of fire had in a Saturday in spring of the year 61. The sun announced itself far away on the east, but close to its birth, the sky was bleeding, preparing another birth of flame for it. The Outskirt of the Torn Hand whispered in the leaves and the tongues of a bonfire which Nigel had lit, for he sometimes could not sleep and went to watch the morning twilight or dawn lighting a bonfire in the land of his neighbors and friends. I was unable to sleep too, and as so many times I started to walk to my parents' home, and there I found, only him awake, the man that I still called my father-in-law.