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of the news, Arredondo found it hard to
renounce those museums of ephemera. He was
not a thinking man, or one much given to
meditation.
His days and his nights were the same, but
Sundays weighed on him.
In mid-July he surmised he'd been mistaken
in parceling out his time, which bears us along
one way or another anyway. At that point he
allowed his imagination to wander through the
wide countryside of his homeland, now bloody,
through the rough fields of Santa Irene where
he had once flown kites, to a certain stocky little
piebald horse, surely dead by now, through the
dust raised by the cattle when the drovers
herded them in, to the exhausted stagecoach
that arrived every month with its load of
trinkets from Fray Bentos, through the bay of
La Agraciada where the Thirty-three came
ashore, to the Hervidero, through ragged
mountains, wildernesses, and rivers, through
the Cerro he had scaled to the lighthouse,
thinking that on the two banks of the River
Plate there was not another like it. From the