The conductor stretched out his arms, making the gesture of giving a gift, believing this was the only way to relieve him of his guilt. But the day never came! He kept the little box in his uniform pocket. The streetcars emptied and filled again, but the desired occasion never arrived. Agustina was the last to get on and the first to get off. The gesture required the solitude of a cloister at midnight, and he would never get the chance to be alone with her. When the streetcar was empty Agustina was never there, and one day she never appeared again. All the usual people got on, but never her. And in her absence the streets began to fill with unexpected Agustinas. When he’d set the streetcar in motion, the conductor thought he saw her appear on every corner. He gathered his dying hopes into that bent and broken metallic grid, the safety net that all the streetcars have up front, to avoid accidents.

It was a day when the pavement was as sticky as chewing gum. On a traffic-clogged corner, Agustina’s eyes were shining behind the window of an automobile. The conductor put the hand he used for ringing the bell over his heart and stopped the streetcar. He got off and ran into the street, deafened by the car horns, feeling that in an act of abandonment, more is stolen than in a robbery. He ran between the cars and the people, after a face that appeared and disappeared in all the women with long hair, away from the abandoned streetcar that lay like an unrevivable dead man, surrounded by people in the middle of the street.