The beloved, like God, is essentially an altar where the reserve of love within us is consumed. This sacrifice, this offering, is not addressed to God or the lover; they are merely the Pretext for its performance. The sacrifice is an End in itself.
Alfonso Aldevaran, a middle-aged, thoroughly respectable man, unmarried, an employee for thirty consecutive years at the Ministry of Finance, develops, overnight, an inexplicable, uncontrollable, religious-like worship for the buttocks of his young maid, Anna.
But what was the particular significance, the dark truth he discovered there? Why did Anna's buttocks manage to awaken his soul from its lethargy and illuminate it with a ray of joy? This was a question to which he could not provide any satisfactory answer, but his inability was not irrational but imperative, as every object of worship encloses a mystery upon which the feeling of devotion it inspires is based and without which it would be impossible to exist and be conceived as such; it is a mystery that does not seek to be solved but to remain as it is and that reflects something of the enigma of the worshiper himself.