Carmen would later tell the AFP that the first thing that came into her mind, while the floor was moving in the wrong direction, was not the earthquake of 1900, of which her father had spoken to her as one speaks of a fairy tale, nor the one of 1967 that she herself had felt at the age of six, but rather the way in which her sister's bed, bought in Maturín in 1988 and had transported to Caracas on a truck that had been forced to stop three times because of overheating, had been placed perpendicular to the window because Aída said she wanted to hear the sparrows on the sill, and the sparrows of Caracas were not like those of Maturín, they were quicker and more nervous, they would choose one cornice at a time, they would abandon a neighbourhood if for two weeks the sun beat down too hard, and when Aída, six years earlier, had been confined to bed on account of a fall that had broken her right hip in two places, the bed had been moved in just that way, against the south wall, because she had said, in the voice that after the injections had become another voice, that at least in the morning she would hear someone coming; and now, instead, something was coming that was no one, a running of water inside the earth, and Carmen understood, while the glass of water on the bedside table slid towards the edge without spilling, that her sister would not be able to walk, that the castors of the bed might, in theory, roll all the way to the door, and that the door of the adjoining room had been, since 1991, chosen as the safest in the house for reasons that had nothing to do with earthquakes — it was the door that opened onto the corridor through which the gas pipes did not run — and this coincidence, of a knowledge ripened for other fears that now revealed itself useful for this one, gave her the sensation, lasting perhaps half a second, of being at a precise point in the universe from which everything had meaning, and then the second tremor began, and Carmen was no longer at that point.

Aída, from the bed, said: go away, Carmen, go away.

The sentence arrived in a strange way, because Aída had not raised her voice, and all the rest of the house was raising its own: the wardrobe in Carmen's room that hummed like a wasps' nest, the panes of the kitchen that beat against their frames like birds, the glass of water, which now was falling, and something in the sitting room that fell together with the glass but with a deeper thud, a bookcase perhaps, one of those that Carmen's husband, dead in 2019, had built with his own hands in a week of holiday, choosing the shelves one by one at the timber yard of La Yaguara because he did not want, he said, the ready-made shelves that warped after two years. Aída repeated: go away.

Carmen did not go away. She released the brake of the first castor of the bed, then of the second, and standing beside the bed, her shoulder against the headboard, she began to push towards the door. Three metres. They seemed to her the bed of a river. Aída said, while Carmen pushed: and the sparrows? Carmen answered: the sparrows left earlier. She said it because it was true — she no longer heard them — but also because she had read somewhere, perhaps in a Funvisis pamphlet handed out to a bread queue in 2003, perhaps in a little book by her doctor that spoke of the behaviours of the human body, that animals feel the tremors first and that one must trust them. Carmen had never trusted the sparrows. Now she trusted them because Aída had asked her to, and because it was easier than saying anything else.

The bed passed through the door. Carmen let Aída's head go through last, because the frame of the entrance was low. In the adjoining room, which opened onto the corridor without gas pipes, Carmen sat down on the floor beside the bed and held still with her hand the left castor, which reminded her, while she held it, of when Aída's husband, dead in 1994, had taught her to mount the wheels of a bicycle. He had been a mechanic, and he used to say that the wheels of hospital beds were badly made, that they were too narrow, that they would hold up to nothing. He had been right. One of the castors, now that Carmen held it back, vibrated as though it wanted to come loose. Carmen held it tighter. Aída closed her eyes and said: wait, and Carmen waited.

When the second tremor ended, Aída was still alive. Carmen did not get up at once. She remained seated on the floor, her hand on the castor, and began to count the grandchildren who were sleeping outside Caracas and who in a few hours would know. There were five of them, in three different cities. The first to call would be Luz María, who in Valencia worked as a switchboard operator. Carmen counted up to how many minutes the call would take and realised, while she counted, that the light was still on, that the electrical panel had held, and that Aída's bedside lamp cast upon the wall a shadow she had never seen in that room, the room that since 1991 had been the safest in the house. The shadow resembled a thing that Carmen could not manage to name. It seemed to her that it resembled the way in which, as a child, her mother used to comb her hair before sending her to sleep.