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abutments, furiously as possible, noisy and lashing. (This last I was thinking.) It was worth it to lean over the parapet of the bridge and to hear in my ears the grinding of the ice there below. It was worth it to stop a little bit for the view, a little bit from fear too which came from inside—or it was being without a coat, the light snowfall melting and my topcoat at the hotel—And after all, for I am an unassuming girl, a girl without petty prides, but let them come tell me that the same thing could have happened to anyone else, that she could have journeyed to Hungary in the middle of the Odeón. Say, that would give anyone the shivers!
    But mama was pulling at my sleeve, there was hardly anyone left in the orchestra section. I’m writing to that point, not wishing to go on remembering what I thought. I’m going to get sick if I go on remembering. But it’s certain, certain; I thought of an odd thing.

    J ANUARY 30
    Poor Luis María, what an idiot to get married to me. He doesn’t know what he’ll get on top of that. Or underneath that, Nora says, posing as an emancipated intellectual.
    J ANUARY 31
    We’ll be going there. He was so agreeable about it I almost screamed. I was afraid, it seemed to me that he entered into this game too easily. And he doesn’t know anything, he’s like a queen’s pawn that sews up the game without even suspecting it. The little pawn Luis María beside his queen. Beside the queen and—
    F EBRUARY 7
    What’s important now is to get better. I won’t write the end of what I had thought at the concert. Last night again I sensed her suffering. I know that they’re beating me there again. I can’t avoid knowing it, but enough chronicle. If I had limited myself to setting this down regularly just as a whim, as alleviation … It was worse, a desire to understand in reading it over; to find keys in each word set to paper after those nights. Like when I thought of the plaza, the torn river and the noises and afterwards … But I’m not writing that, I’ll never, ever, write that.
    To go there to convince myself that celibacy has been no good for me, that it’s nothing more than that, to be twenty-seven years old and never to have had a man. Now he will be my puppy, my penguin, enough to think and to be, to be finally and for good.
    Nevertheless, now that I shall close this diary, for one gets married or one keeps a diary, the two things don’t gowell together—even now I don’t want to finish it up without saying this with the happiness of hope, with hope for happiness. We will go there but it doesn’t have to be what I thought the night of the concert. (I’ll write it, and enough of the diary as far as I’m concerned.) I will find her on the bridge and we will look at one another. The night of the concert I felt echo in my ears the grinding of the ice there below. And it will be the queen’s victory over that malignant relationship, that soundless and unlawful encroachment. If I am really I, she will yield, she will join my radiant
zone
, my lovelier and surer life; I have only to go to her side and lay a hand on her shoulder.
    Alina Reyes de Aráoz and her husband arrived in Budapest April sixth, and took accommodations at the Ritz. That was two months before their divorce. On the afternoon of the second day, Alina went out to get to know the city and enjoy the thaw. As it pleased her to walk alone—she was brisk and curious—she went in twenty different directions looking vaguely for something, but without thinking about it too much, content to let her desire choose, that it express itself in abrupt changes of direction which led her from one store window to another, crossing streets, moving from one showcase to another.
    She came to the bridge and crossed it as far as the middle, walking now with some difficulty because the snow hindered her and from the Danube a wind comes up from below, a difficult wind which hooks and lashes. She felt as though her skirt were