The Incredible And Sad Tale Of Innocent Erendira And Her...

Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of her misfortune began to blow. The enormous mansion of moon like concrete lost in the solitude of the desert trembled down to its foundations with the first attack. But Erendira and her grandmother were used to the risks of the wild nature there, and in the bathroom decorated with a series of peacocks and childish mosaics of Roman baths they scarcely paid any attention to the wind. The grandmother, naked and huge in the marble tub, looked like a handsome white whale. The granddaughter had just turned fourteen and was languid, soft-boned, and too meek for her age. With a parsimony that had something like sacred rigor about it, she was bathing her grandmother with water in which purifying†¦show more content†¦Around eleven o clock, when she was changing the water in the ostrich s bowl and watering the desert weeds around the twin graves of the Amadises, she had to fight off the anger of the wind, which had become unbearable, but she didn t have the slightest feeling that it was the wind of her misfortune. At twelve o clock she was wiping the last champagne glasses when she caught the smell of broth and had to perform the miracle of running to the kitchen without leaving a disaster of Venetian glass in her wake. She just managed to take the pot off the stove as it was beginning to boil over. Then she put on a stew she had already prepared and took advantage of a chance to sit down and rest on a stool in the kitchen. She closed her eyes, opened them again with an unfatigued expression, and began pouring the soup into the tureen. She was working as she slept. The grandmother had sat down alone at the head of a banquet table with silver candlesticks set for twelve people. She shook her little bell and Erendira arrived almost immediately with the steaming tureen. As Erendira was serving the soup, her grandmother noticed the somnambulist look and passed her hand in front of her eyes as if wiping an invisible pane of glass. The girl