From there until the hour of the nighttime meal, everything was a jumble in Santa's mind. Her poor memory, as if bruised during the proceedings, retained precise details concerning certain things of scant importance but tended to garble her recollection of other more crucial things. Lying in the bed that they had given her for her own, a soft double bed of bronze posts and rails with more gold plating than the chapel of the church in her village, Santa's head split with a tremendous headache that kept her from opening her eyes for two hours. She tried to remember what the doctors had done to her during the exam that, in the end, they had absolutely insisted on doing. She remembered a lithographic portrait in a varnished wooden frame, an odd-looking man wearing a military uniform but with a handkerchief covering his hair and knotted at the back; she remembered the eyeglasses of one of the doctors that kept slipping down his nose; she remembered the vulgar physiognomy of a male nurse who stared at her as if wanting to eat her. About the exam itself, however, she remembered nothing, only that they had made her lie on a sort of table covered with rather filthy oil cloth, that they had probed her with a metal apparatus, and … nothing else, no, nothing else. Also that the room smelled very bad, of that stuff that they put under the bed when they lay out dead people … What's it called? Iodu, iodi … iodoform, something like that, sickly sweet stuff, the smell of which makes you dizzy and want to gag.

What she remembered very well, indeed, was that when she sat up and was straightening her dress, the doctors addressed her familiarly as tú and even made some abusive jokes that provoked loud laughter from Pepa and flashing anger in Santa, surprised that such gentlemen feel they can casually mock a woman … like her.

The word that came to her mind in that moment, the vulgar term that from now on would be applied to her, made her squeeze her eyes more tightly shut and press her hand over the ear not sunk into her pillow as she lay on her side, flexing her knees to draw up her legs; and yet the word came and lashed at her temples and the interior of her entire skull, making her headache even worse. She was not a woman now, but a …

For the second time in that tragic day, she felt an overwhelming desire to get out of there, to flee back to her village, to her own little corner of the world, to her family, her birds, her flowers … where she had always lived, a place she had never expected to leave, much less be chased away from by her brothers. What would they do without her? Could they have forgotten her so quickly? The anguish of fearing herself forgotten made her sit up abruptly on the edge of the bed, her hands falling to the hollow in her dress between her half-opened legs, her feet not reaching the floor, swinging unconsciously, mechanically backward and forward, her eyes fixed on a vision of her village, her humble but cheerful abode, adorned with ivy, heliotropes, and bellflowers, a home she had disgraced and to which she could never, ever return.