And he plummeted down the stairs without seeming to mind the pounding of his bare heels on the stone steps, and, passing through the courtyard, he could not resist kicking over a soapy basin full of socks belonging to Sordo and the curate …

SANTA'S LIFE AS A MATADOR'S MISTRESS was tranquil, indeed. One week slipped quietly along after the next in the insipid atmosphere of the Guipuzcoana Boarding House, amid Gallego's jokes, Sordo's wheedling, Ripoll's rages, and the curate's constant, if elastic, moralizing. Santa started to laugh as soon as Gallegos seemed about to speak, asking him to sing music from zarazuelas and listening for hours to stories, true and fabricated, from his bohemian life as a comic actor. In the presence of don Práxedes, true to her country upbringing, Santa kissed the priest's hand, and with doña Nicasia she talked about her village, her Chimalistac, at once so near and so far away, with its fruit trees and little white houses, between the villages of San Angel and Santa Catarina. Ripoll interested her, without her knowing why; Izquierdo, the pawnbroker, frightened her because she thought that one day he might try to make off with her jewelry, which he studied intently at the table whenever they shared a meal; and toward Abascal, the retailer, who sighed for her behind el Jarameño's back, she was utterly indifferent.

Her love for the torero seemed to wear away with the passage of the weeks, each so like the next, so featureless, so without parties or excitement. They would go for carriage rides some afternoons, attend the theater and dine out occasionally in the evening, wandering the shops together and buying things that, afterward, once brought home to their room, seemed totally out of place.

That the man loved her cannot be doubted. What frenetic caresses and extremes! What lightening glares when they spoke of the sordid past, what sweet humility of an indomitable beast restraining itself when they spoke of a future without pain or shadows, there in his Andalusian home, very soon, just as soon as he finished his contract. Nonetheless, if not for the weekly alarm of Sundays, and the danger that a bull might rip el Jarameño's belly open, if not for the drunkenness of his weekly home-comings, safe and sound, smelling like a goat and falling insatiably on her gorgeous body, that he took and took until he hurt her, begging her to bite him hard—if not for all of this, Santa would have tired of him. She would have left him without hatred, but it would not have been hard for her to do.

She had imagined it differently, this life he promised during his visits to Elvira's house. She had envisioned a continual party, guitars and toreros, Spanish wine and the bullring, Santa there, highly visible, el Jarameño dedicating his kills to her, the public learning of their love, applauding Santa like the poor cigarette girl Carmen, who loves a bullfighter in Bizet's eponymous opera … And what a contrast with reality! El Jarameño was jealous about the past, jealous about the present, distancing himself from old friends and new admirers, excluding third parties in the carriage rides and dinner outings, as selfish as all men when they are in love and really believe they can fulfill all a woman's heterogeneous and unguessable aspirations by themselves. No, the perpetual and monotonous “I love you” is not enough, or at least it was not enough for Santa. She had heard it so often and from so many! One Sunday she even told Jenaro, who never failed to appear in the matador's absence, that she missed her old life …