with an energy ever weaker and seemed to grow lighter with the years.

Rafael, from long periods of absence, noted his father's condition
better than the rest. The old man was ill, very ill. As tall as ever, as
austere and imposing, and as little given to words. But he was growing
thinner. His fierce eyes were sinking deeper into their sockets. There
was little left to him now except his massive frame. His neck, once as
sturdy as a bull's, showed the tendons and the arteries under the loose,
wrinkled skin; and his mustache, once so arrogant, but now withering
with each successive day, drooped dispiritedly like the banner of a
defeated army wet with rain.

The boy was surprised at the gestures and tears of anger with which his
mother welcomed expression of his fears.

"Well, I hope he'll die as soon as possible ... Lot's of use he is to
us!... May the Lord be merciful and take him off right now."

Rafael said nothing, not caring to pry into the conjugal drama that was
secretly and silently playing its last act before his eyes.

Don Ramón, that somber libertine of insatiable appetites, prey to a
sinister, mysterious inebriation, was tossing in a last whirlwind of
tempestuous desire, as though the blaze of sunset had set fire to what
remained of his vitality.

With a deliberate, determined lustfulness, he went scouring the
District like a wild satyr, and his brutish assaults, his terrorism and
abuse of authority, were reported back by scurrilous tongues to the
seignorial mansion, where his friend don Andrés was trying in vain to