Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio

A gypsy girl approached Don Zana and Alfanhui and held out her tambourine. Don Zana said to her, 'You don't pay for art, kid.

They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace.

But Alfanhui didn't want to abuse the rosemary, because one shouldn't tell a lot in one day, since the stories lose their strength.