Rosa Diamond recounts Martin de la Cruz’s death through a final, unstable revelation that Gibreel Farishta experiences as both witness and participant. The account does not settle into a single version of the killing: shifting visions distribute responsibility among Rosa, Aurora del Sol, and Henry Diamond, while the aftermath reveals that the murder was left unprosecuted and that Rosa carried a knife home as a souvenir. The past becomes visible just as Rosa fades, making the act of telling inseparable from Gibreel’s encounter with her approaching death.

The revelation and its frame

The episode unfolds in Rosa’s bedroom, where Gibreel has already begun to see apparitions with increasing clarity. Their emergence coincides with Rosa becoming fainter, as if the living woman and the figures from her past are exchanging places. Gibreel understands that these manifestations depend on him and on his own weakened state: he has a stomach ache and feels a stone-like heaviness, which makes him fear for his life. The recollection is therefore not presented as a detached account. It takes shape through a vision that affects the listener physically and makes him unsure of his own safety.

The immediate disclosure concerns Henry Diamond’s earlier request that Dr. Jorge Babington falsify Juan Julia’s death certificate. Dr. Babington says that he complied because of their old friendship, but now considers that decision wrong. He accuses Henry of sheltering a killer and urges him to leave with his wife before matters worsen. Henry insists that he is already home and objects to the doctor’s reference to Rosa. As Dr. Babington fades, his remark about the English never truly leaving England, unless they fall in love as Rosa did, links the concealed history to the couple’s eventual return from Argentina.

A murder shown in incompatible versions

The visions then carry Gibreel into a landscape transformed by giant thistles. He sees a woman running barefoot through them, whom Rosa identifies as Aurora del Sol. Rosa’s account connects Aurora with betrayal and with Martin’s becoming a murderer, but the images that follow do not deliver a single, stable sequence of events. Instead, Gibreel is drawn through successive possible versions of the encounter at a pond in the thistle-covered landscape.

In one version, Rosa and Martin meet there, and after she leaves, a hand reaches from the thistles and takes Martin’s silver-hafted knife. The image shifts: Rosa arrives again, and the meeting turns into an assault that ends when she finds the knife. Gibreel cries out against this version, and the scene changes once more. In another tableau, Rosa and Martin are together when Henry appears, draws a small pistol, and aims at his rival. The sequence breaks apart again: Gibreel experiences Aurora attacking Martin, then Rosa attacking him, and then a version in which Henry’s bullet has killed him and the Englishman takes Martin’s knife and stabs him. These are presented as competing images rather than reconciled testimony; the vision establishes the unresolved nature of the remembered killing without authoritatively identifying one complete account.

The shifting scenes culminate in Gibreel screaming and losing consciousness. Their effect is not simply to supply missing plot information. The reader encounters the murder as a set of interrupted and contradictory reenactments, with Gibreel unable to control which version appears. The repeated corrections and transitions make the act of remembering itself central: the past arrives in fragments, while the decisive question of what happened remains unsettled.

The aftermath and the keepsake

When Gibreel regains consciousness, Rosa is speaking softly to herself. She recalls that the south-west wind, the pampero, flattened the thistles, and wonders whether that happened before or after Martin was found. Her uncertainty persists even as she supplies the last events in the story. At Martin’s funeral, Aurora spat in Rosa’s face. An arrangement was made that nobody would be charged with the murder, provided Henry took Rosa back to England without delay. They boarded a train at the Los Alamos station while men in white suits and borsalino hats watched to ensure that they really left.

Once the train was moving, Rosa opened the holdall beside her and revealed that she had brought a small keepsake. Inside the cloth bundle was a gaucho’s silver-hafted knife. The object gives the recollection a material remainder: although the couple left Argentina and the case ended without anyone being charged, the knife crossed the distance with Rosa. It also recalls the visions in which a knife passes between the characters, but the account does not establish that the keepsake resolves who used it or how Martin died.

Rosa says that Henry died in the first winter after their return, followed by the war and then its end. Against the vastness of the life she remembers, her diminished present feels unbearable; her final reflection is that everything shrinks. As the moonlight changes, Gibreel feels the weight lift from him. Rosa lies still with her eyes closed, and he realizes that he can leave the room. The scene closes not with a verdict on Martin’s death but with the end of Rosa’s revelation and the release of Gibreel from the vision that had held him.