Simona escapes Fortín Tiburcio when a flood carries away Renato Bley, the husband who had isolated and abused her. The escape begins as a desperate wish not to die imprisoned, but ends with Simona choosing where to go and reclaiming a life beyond the estancia.

Confinement and the decision to survive

Renato had cut Simona off from her family: after her sister-in-law Salomé took charge of the mail, no further letters reached her. On Simona’s twenty-eighth birthday, Renato declared that she would never again set foot in Buenos Aires. She answered inwardly with a secret resolve: she would not turn thirty at Fortín Tiburcio, even if escape required her to kill herself. Imagining Renato’s rage at her corpse briefly made suicide seem like a peaceful release, but that thought also returned her sense of self. As she recognized the means of her confinement—distance, isolation, dependence on people financially tied to Renato, and a fence meant to keep both cattle and Simona inside—she began to think continually about escape. She learned to comply outwardly, avoid beatings, and placate her sisters-in-law, not because she had accepted captivity, but because survival gave her time to look for a way out.

The flood and Renato’s death

The danger of escape was not abstract. Renato had killed Simona’s mare with a gunshot, she could not drive, and she slept in a locked room. She kept planning, but he never left her alone, as if he sensed what she was considering. After the months passed and she turned twenty-nine, she believed she might have to kill herself. Then, one January, rain fell for days. The Arroyo Salado rose until its waters merged visually with the immense lagoon called Mar Chiquita; the flood tore away the fence that had enclosed the estancia.

A farmhand came into the house at mealtime, leaving puddles across the floor as Simona’s sisters-in-law shouted. He had news more urgent than their complaints: the water was carrying off the cattle. Renato rose and ordered Simona to get dressed and come with him. They drove out alone in a jeep. The road had vanished beneath the water, and Renato navigated from memory, while rain forced its way through the closed windows. Loose cows bellowed, the fence was gone, and the jeep stalled twice before he managed to continue to the riverbank.

There, fallen sections of fence had caught cattle and prevented them from tumbling into the river’s center, but the torrent—rushing down with stones, bricks, and even whole trees—had already swept some animals away. Renato climbed down with a rope and pulled one cow to safety, then another. Simona watched, thinking his labor futile: even the cattle he rescued remained surrounded by water. Then she suddenly could no longer see him.

Renato called for her to bring a rope, but Simona approached the bank slowly. She saw him below, abruptly helpless, clinging to a small root that soon broke. She could not dislodge it with her foot before the current took him. She had wanted to kill him, not save him; now she had done neither. As his head struck a rock and the foam turned red, she could hardly believe that the outcome was real. At that instant the rain stopped, after four days and three nights, though the river still ran violently.

Leaving the estancia and returning to Buenos Aires

Simona walked back alone, taking more than two hours. She was not lost and was no longer afraid; she paused because she remembered her mother and wept, then felt the world, the field, and her own chest grow larger. The sound of her boots in the water pleased her, and when the clouds opened to reveal a patch of blue, she stopped to look. She could have returned to the house whenever she chose, but instead went to Fortín Tiburcio to report Renato’s death. Gendarmes later drove her back to the estancia.

Renato’s remains surfaced over the following days: first his trunk, with almost a whole leg and half an arm, then other fragments, and finally a skull that could not be confidently identified as his. Fish had consumed the rest. His death ended his authority over Simona at once. On her thirtieth birthday, she was in Buenos Aires, having survived the age she had once feared she would never reach.

The first thing Simona did as Renato’s widow was cut her hair, so no one could ever again drag her by it across the floor. She took possession of the house, half the land, and a substantial sum of money. Her sisters-in-law tried to discredit her among the neighbors and hired a lawyer, who charged them nothing, but they could not prevent her from inheriting her husband’s property. Her brother-in-law Pedro, Augusta’s husband, treated her more considerately, recognizing that he would have to continue dealing with her over the estancia for years.

After settling the paperwork with Pedro, Simona returned to the Buenos Aires neighborhood she loved. She bought an apartment on Rivadavia Street, in the building beside her mother’s, and kept her story to herself until Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s persistent affection finally disarmed her.

Aftermath and the life reclaimed

Simona’s return to Buenos Aires did not erase what had happened at the estancia, but it made her survival tangible. She was back in the neighborhood she loved, living in an apartment on Rivadavia Street in the building beside her mother’s. The proximity sharply reversed the isolation Renato had imposed: the woman whose family’s letters had been intercepted could now live next door to her mother. Yet she did not tell anyone her story. Silence remained her choice until Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s loving persistence finally disarmed her.

When Manuel asked why she would want a woman like herself, Simona answered by measuring herself against the imagined alternatives: pretty, simple, good girls, he could choose one of them. She said she had already lived and could not give him what he wanted. Her words show that freedom from Renato’s control did not instantly restore an uncomplicated sense of the future. The flood had carried her out of the life in which she expected to die, but trust and intimacy came later, through the gradual breaking of the silence she had kept around her past.