Explore "The Nine Guardians" by Rosario Castellanos on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Waking to the noise of steps on the veranda, to the flurry with which the animals met the daybreak, each sound was enough to force Matilde out of the soft and mossy cave of her sleeping, sending her back into herself in a groping search for the place where her pain lay. Even before she had become aware of waking to a strange house, far away from Francisca, far from happy times, Matilde perceived that her waking was necessarily to suffering. In vain she pressed her lids tight, begging sleep for a moment's further truce. The violent clanging of the chapel bell, the patter of bare feet, the shouts in tzeltal, all conspired against her and thrust her out into that chill inclemency called her conscience. Then she would open her eyes unnaturally wide, struggling like an animal caught in a trap. Matilde would sit up, galvanized, slip to the edge of the bed, and there, her face buried in her hands, she would repeat aloud as if someone had been at hand to contradict her:
"I'll never get through the day."