Of course, I count. Every thirty days, I say to myself that a month has gone by, but those are mere words, they don’t really give me time.

And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.

I cannot mourn for what I have not known.

Inevitably, with memory comes pain.

It was most enjoyable having someone as intelligent as myself to talk to.

The narrator is at the heart of this doubleness, presenting her memories and theories to us from a space of peculiar neutrality. She is not like the other women of the novel, with their memories of the outside world and knowledge of relationships, sex, love and family. Her body never developed the markers of reproduction, and being raised in an

‘I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all’,

The briefest conversation creates time.

Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones and producing, occasionally, just enough flowers to make a single seed which will fall a little way off—not far because the wind is never strong—where it