Esperanza didn’t know anyone in that house except Florián. The neighbor ladies always gossiped about his sisters and his mother, who all had permed hairdos (curlers or hot oil treatments was the topic of a serious debate between the shopkeeper’s sisters) and lacquered nails, though they never paid the baker. Florián skipped school to beg in the streets, intentionally crossing one eye. But he almost always collected more alms with his earnest angelic face than with his wandering eye. Esperanza didn’t know about this scheme—she trusted the virtuous blue of Florián’s eyes, his shyness, his plaintive beggar’s voice. She would never have even acknowledged the suffering or hunger of some boy who skipped school to beg with a voluntarily blind eye. She could have seen that kind of boy crushed beneath a bus, starving to death on a corner, or committing suicide with a dirty kitchen knife, and she wouldn’t have taken one step to save him. But the innocent virtue of Florián’s eyes—the same eyes as the Baby Jesus—had won her heart, to the point of letting him sit on her meager lap at midnight when she was alone. And there, in the faith that she was saving him from his family, she taught him the prayers written on the back of the pictures of saints, which came with indulgences for twenty, forty, fifty days.

Sleep placed its holy hands over Florián’s eyes while he reported everything he had worked on in the house that day. He had helped Leonor sweep the bedroom. Leonor had to iron a new nightgown and arrange the artificial flowers in a vase atop a macramé tablecloth in her room. And he had to clean the toilet, peel the potatoes, and rinse all the vegetables for lunch. “Poor little angel!” Esperanza sighed. When he arrived late to school, which was his sister’s fault, the teacher had beaten him with a whip she kept hidden in a desk drawer. She had told him that she didn’t want any tramps in school, no good-for-nothings, no sons of whores. Esperanza raised her ample, trembling arms to the ceiling in shock: “Is it possible that the teacher said such things to you?” Florián, her perfect little martyr, nodded his head. The previous day seemed like a long time ago now, and he remembered walking all the busiest, traffic-clogged streets, torturing his eyes without receiving a single coin, and then when he was on his way home with his normal face, when he wasn’t even trying to move anyone to pity, a woman had given him a whole peso’s worth of coins and asked him his name. He had spent the peso on movies, pastries, and the streetcar. He couldn’t go back home with a mere cent in his pocket. His sisters, who earned at least four pesos a day, would disown him. He couldn’t tell Esperanza any of this, nor could he tell her that he had peed against a new automobile and torn his sister’s blouse. “You son of a bitch,” the fruit seller’s son had called him. “Your mother doesn’t pay me, yet I give her money. If she doesn’t pay for the shop window you broke, I’ll take you all down to the police station.” But then the next day, Valentini the fruit seller would come to the house as he always did, smiling at each of them and handing out candies from his store with prayers on their wrappers, and his sister would pat his cheek, calling him: “You little rascal, you.” Valentini forgot everything when he was with Florián’s sisters, and when he came to the house he didn’t even remotely resemble that fruit seller Valentini in his white apron, arranging his goods in the window. What extraordinary virtue did his sisters possess?