A woman called from the only room he possessed, ‘José, José.’ He crouched like a galley-slave at the sound; his eyes left the sky, and the constellations fled upwards: the beetles crawled over the patio. ‘José, José.’ He thought with envy of the men who had died: it was over so soon. They were taken up there to the cemetery and shot against the wall: in two minutes life was extinct. And they called that martyrdom. Here life went on and on; he was only sixty-two. He might live to ninety. Twenty-eight years – that immeasurable period between his birth and his first parish: all childhood and
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