“Today I cooked the meal myself,” proclaimed doña Nicasia. “There's cod, garlic soup, scrambled eggs with tomato, and potpourri.”

“And the wine is on me!” shouted el Jarameño, arriving, radiant, hand in hand with Santa, who was blushing, if you can believe it, blushing, and secretly worried. Would they figure out what she had been? Would they see it in her face?

Fortunately, the round of applause that exploded at that moment bolstered her spirit and gave her confidence, even though they were applauding mostly for the dishes announced by doña Nicasia and the wine, promised by el Jarameño, that quickly materialized in a basket carried by Bruno: two dozen clinking bottles of real Spanish red wine from la Rioja.

Without difficulty, Santa captured this bunch of two-bit fortune seekers in her man net, the tool of an elegant and experienced prostitute, a net she had refined and expanded in numerous expeditions, and even mended in places where it threatened to wear out with incessant use. Ripoll succumbed, in spite of his contemptuous theories about women, and Isidoro succumbed as well, although he was trying to remember, as he stared at her, where he had seen this girl before.

The next Sunday, however, el Jarameño had a bullfight, and the scene changed considerably. The crew of lesser toreros who served el Jarameño, their matador, visiting him daily, were used to his periodic, stormy involvements with women, and they treated Santa unquestioningly as his temporary wife, but beginning on Saturday evening, she noticed a change in them. They had lost their accustomed boisterousness and did no laughing nor singing that night, but instead, at any point in the conversation, and especially when it seemed about to recover its characteristic gaiety, they became taciturn, removing the ash from their cigarettes with pensive meticulousness and sighing very, very softly, as if mechanically trying to conceal their mood even from themselves. They gazed fixedly at their “maestro” as if internally lighting votive candles in favor of tomorrow's performance in the bullring, where his skill might bring renown to all of them, but where an error might be fatal.

“Behave yourselves tonight, and tomorrow early, everybody to the bullring to take a look at the bulls we'll be fighting,” el Jarameño said to them when they left.

Santa saw clearly that they went away worried, and that Jarameño, too, was worried as he walked back to the room. At their late supper, he ate soberly, without tasting the wine, and in their warm bed with the light off, he did not embrace her. Surprised and alarmed, she reproached him:

“Don't you love me anymore?” she asked, pressing her body against him in an unmistakable offer.

The matador trembled with temptation, but quieting his fiery temperament, he said to his mistress, as if begging for an enormous favor: