- Now a woman is the narrator for the first time in the novel. She says she is sleeping in the same bed where her mother died, and that she can still feel her presence.
- Then she changes her mind and says that actually she's in a coffin, because she's dead.
- She remembers beautiful nature scenes and also her own puberty at the time of her mother's death.
- The narrator addresses someone named Justina, who had to prepare the house for visitors after the mother's death. No one had come to visit, though.
- The woman was too poor when her mother died to pay the mass necessary to send her mother to heaven. She had to pay strangers to carry the coffin and dig the grave.