It took a while before I realised that they were supposed to be elephants. I could see Dona Esmeralda's back. She always sat in the same place, in about the middle of the house, when she was directing rehearsals. Since the rehearsal was under way, I waited to approach to her. I had a hard time working out what the play was about since the actors' words were impossible to hear from behind the long trunks hanging in front of their faces. But it seemed to me that they sounded annoyed. They kicked irritably at their trunks, moving awkwardly and ponderously in the balloon-like suits, which must have been quite hot.

As the rehearsal continued without interruption, I thought that I shouldn't wait any longer, so I walked tentatively down the middle aisle towards where Dona Esmeralda was sitting. She had taken off her hat and laid it on the floor near her chair. She was totally still. When I got close, I saw that she had fallen asleep. But she was sitting erect; her chin had not sunk towards her chest. The actors onstage shouldn't notice that she was asleep. I was about to retreat when she woke with a start and looked at me. She gestured with one hand that I was to sit down beside her. Carefully I moved the bottle of cognac from next to her chair and sat down. All the while the elephants were bellowing incomprehensibly at each other on the stage. Then Dona Esmeralda leaned towards me and whispered in my ear.

'What do you think of our new play?'

'It looks good,' I whispered back.

'It's about a herd of elephants that is afflicted by religious problems,' she said. 'It's a reminder of those evil days when my father still ruled this country. Towards the end of the play he appears onstage himself, with a drawn sword. If I can find anyone to play him, that is. The elephants are actually revolutionary soldiers.'

I have to admit that I had no idea what she was talking about. Since the actors up onstage seemed annoyed, I assumed that they didn't understand what the play was about either. But I didn't dare to venture any remark except to repeat what I had already said, that it looked good. Dona Esmeralda nodded contentedly and then seemed to forget I was there. She was following the rehearsal with a rapt expression of childish delight. I watched her surreptitiously, thinking that it was exactly this child's sense of joy that was keeping her alive, despite the fact that she was at least ninety or maybe even a hundred years old.

I thought she had forgotten that I was sitting there at her side when she suddenly looked at me again.

'I fired the dough mixer,' she said. 'What was his name?'

'Julio.'

'I told him to get himself an instrument and try to be a musician. I think he'd be good at it.'

Even though Dona Esmeralda always went to great lengths to avoid firing the people she employed, it could not be totally avoided. And she never let anyone go without recommending what type of work they ought to take up in the future. I knew that she was nearly always right. I tried to imagine what instrument would suit Julio, but I couldn't come up with anything.

Dona Esmeralda interrupted my thoughts. 'A new dough mixer is coming tonight. That's why I wanted to see you. I've hired a woman.'

A woman? But the flour sacks are heavy!'

'Maria is very strong. She's as strong as she is beautiful.'

The conversation was over. Dona Esmeralda signalled to me that I could go. I left the dark theatre, thankful that she had not sent for me to talk about Nelio.

She had said that Maria was as strong as she was beautiful. And God knows, she was right! When I went into the bakery late that night to start my work, there stood the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I fell instantly in love with her. At that moment no one else existed but her. We shook hands.

'My name is Maria,' she said.

'I love you,' I thought of saying. But of course I didn't. I simply told her my name.

'My name is also Maria,' I said. 'José Antonio Maria. The flour sacks are very heavy.'

I placed a sack – a white one with blue-and-red stripes – right next to her feet. She leaned forward, bent her knees and lifted it high over her head.

How could a woman be so strong? How could a woman be so strong and yet so beautiful?

'Have you worked in a bakery before?' I asked.

'Yes,' she said. 'I know how to mix dough.'

And she did. I just had to tell her how many portions of dough we needed to make each night and what Dona Esmeralda's special wishes were. Maria nodded, and I never had to remind her again.

She was so beautiful that several times I forgot all about Nelio. It wasn't until I let her go home around midnight that he once again entered my consciousness, although not until I had gone out into the street to see whether some man was waiting for Maria. But she went off alone into the night. At that moment I married her in my mind.

It was not until I was on my way up the winding stairs to the roof that I remembered where I was going and why. I immediately felt guilty. A human being was dying on the roof, and I had only my new dough mixer Maria on my mind. I forced myself to feel ashamed, though it was difficult, and then I rushed up to the roof.

Nelio was awake when I got there. Earlier in the evening, before Maria arrived, I had borrowed an old tattered blanket from the nightwatchman outside the Indian photographer's shop. I gave him a loaf of bread and a matchbox filled with tea leaves in return for the loan of the blanket. I had spread it over Nelio to protect him from the cool winds blowing over the city. I had given him some of Senhora Muwulene's herbs and sat beside him while he had one of his attacks of fever. The cool air seemed to have done him good. He smiled now when he caught sight of me.

At that moment he was a ten-year-old boy. The next moment he could once again be a very old man. He switched back and forth all the time. I never knew which one I would find before me. The only thing that was certain was that he had been lying on the roof for five days and five nights; it was now the sixth night, and the wounds in his chest were getting darker and darker.

Maybe it was meeting Maria that had influenced me – I don't know. But when I changed the bandage and saw that Nelio now showed the unmistakable signs of blood poisoning, I could no longer refrain from speaking my mind.

'You're going to die if you stay here on the roof

'I'm not afraid to die,' he said.

'You don't have to die. Not if you let me take you away from here. To a hospital. The bullets in your body have to come out.'

'I'll tell you when,' he said, as he had so many times before.

'Now it's my turn to say when,' I replied. 'I have to move you now. Otherwise you will die.'

'No,' he said. 'I'm not going to die.'

What was it that made me believe him? How could I allow myself to go along with something that I knew wasn't right?

The answer is that I don't know. But Nelio's power was so great that I yielded to him.

That night he told me about the time after Cosmos crept on board a ship and disappeared into the dawn. Towards daybreak, when Nelio began to grow tired, I could feel that the cool air had once again vanished. When I stood up to leave him and looked at the ocean, I could not see any icebergs.

On the morning when Cosmos left, when Nelio told the others that from now on he would be the leader of the group, everything had proceeded quite calmly. A transfer of leadership might be accompanied by unrest and murky feelings of resistance seeping to the surface. But Nelio told them the truth – that some day Cosmos would come back and then everything would revert to the way it was. He had no intention of changing anything – what he knew about being a leader he had learned from Cosmos.

But this was not entirely true. During the night, when he lay in the horse's belly and sleeplessly waited for dawn and the ranting morning prayers of the maniacally laughing priest, Nelio thought that he would be exactly like Cosmos, but even more so. He would be a little more patient with Tristeza; he would laugh a little more at the endless stories that Alfredo Bomba told. In this way Nelio hoped to be able to exercise the authority that Cosmos had established in the group.