“They’re Singer machines, good ones,” a friend had told her, because Etelvina had mentioned that during her childhood in La Vega she helped her mother sew pajamas and nightgowns for children, curtains and pillowcases, simple things that they would sell in her father’s colmado. She remembered her embroidered name on the little labels her mother put into the necklines, like a brand. ETELVINA, the label read. Etelvina hated her name. A damned ugly name. Etelvina was a servant’s name, an illiterate’s name. It was a name that bestowed on her everything Etelvina wanted to cleanse from the world: poverty, ignorance, filth. Argenis was convinced that in spite of her militant Marxist past she hated the poor. She hated them for their bare, worm-catching feet, for their rags, and for the X they had used to sign their bills in her dad’s shop in her childhood.

Argenis’s grandfather, a Spanish republican who had gone into exile in 1937, had taught her to read and add when she was just five. He’d also explained to her some things about a man named Marx, and she had understood. These people, hardened by poverty and resignation, people who came to them to buy a pound of sugar and bottle of oil on credit, would one day have enough water to bathe in, to brush their teeth. Those monsters who smiled with rotten teeth and bloody gums, those with chewed, greenish nails and rounded, calloused fingers, with skeletal calves, purplish from the leeches in the rice fields, had to be educated so that they could escape from the yoke of their oppressors. Socialism smelled of laundry soap and new textbooks. It was the magic potion against the ugliness of the world. Not against injustice, but against the aesthetic inequality of men.

Around nine in the morning the doors of Balaguer’s house opened and total chaos ran down the line along with the news. A policeman dragged a young pickpocket who had tried to take an older woman’s purse onto the sidewalk across the street. He was jabbing his baton into the boy’s ribs and the people were yelling “Kick his ass,” and things like that.

Argenis then counted how many women were in front of them, omitting the children, men, and old folks, in order to calculate the probability his mother had of getting a sewing machine. He noticed Etelvina was praying again, this time to get one of them. They could see the first few lucky ones walking away with dolls, basketballs, and plastic machine guns. A very tall man was happily carrying a tiny blue bicycle, a teenager – childishly holding the hand of her albino grandfather – carrying a gigantic kitchen set, and behind her an older woman, black as night and assisted by two grandchildren with shaved heads, was carrying a sewing machine with the word BALAGUER printed on its little drawer. It was the kind that needed no electricity, with a metal pedal and a varnished wooden table. It was the same kind Etelvina’s mother had used in La Vega.