It was true. The experiment with a decent life had bored and displeased her, probably because her fall was irreparable. The damage had gone to the root, so to speak, because the two months that the charade lasted should have been long enough for Santa to reacclimatize herself. Besides, el Jarameño really did terrify her. She felt him capable of carrying out the grisly threats that all lovers formulate but few actually execute: the idle death threats that we utter without thinking when a pitiless instinct tells us that love has ended. How can the flesh we adore, the soul we thought incorporated into our own, abandon us, the flesh going to join with other flesh, the soul to another's soul, with no power on earth that can stop them?

“If you stop loving me someday, I'll kill you … I swear I'll kill you!” all lovers say, but few carry out the threat.

Maybe fear itself had something to do with Santa's apparently motiveless infidelity. Maybe it was the voluptuous attraction that danger exercises on feminine temperaments, an unhealthy desire to defy death, to tremble in its presence and breathe its icy breath with delicious terror.

However that may be, one Sunday when the bullfight was unexpectedly terminated halfway through by an enormous scuffle, a protest at the poor quality of the bulls resulting in the armed intervention of the authorities and the broken heads of a number of fans—one treacherous Sunday, Santa betrayed el Jarameño, surrendering herself to Ripoll, who even resisted at first. No, no, it wouldn't be decent, he owed the torero favors, he'd given him his hand in friendship, and so on. But Santa insisted, el Jarameño was far away, he'd never know.

“And I like you, silly! You're a real hard luck case … so let's go!”

Enflamed by the temptress, Ripoll gave up and gave in, allowing himself, in accord with his socialist theories, to destroy the property of someone else almost as a lark, taking the happiness of a happy man, a man to whom he owed a debt of gratitude.

Suddenly, el Jarameño entered the room, a bolt of lightening frozen into a statue at the sight of the ignominious deed. Ripoll made an instant, miraculous escape, leaving only the echo of his hatless, breathless sprint down the stairs and across the courtyard. Then, a second later, came the volcanic eruption, the blinding rage, the need to destroy, to repay harm with harm.

Wobbling slightly, el Jarameño locks the door of the room and tears off the restraining suit of lights. He looks for something in the dresser, then in his street clothes hanging up, and when he finds it, he growls a sinister, guttural sound, as if his Bedouin ancestors were reawakening inside him.

At the balcony door, which stands ajar, enters pallid late-afternoon light and the sounds of Sunday on the street.

Santa thinks her time has come. Quickly, solemnly, tragically, she kneels, looking at the image of the virgin with its two candles, their untrimmed wicks now flickering and hissing. Candles like those placed around a corpse, she thinks. Meanwhile, like a tiger that is about to pounce on its prey, el Jarameño gathers himself and opens his pocketknife with his teeth. It squeaks as it opens, a promise of mayhem. The curved blade glints as he violently extends his arm far back to deliver the most devastating blow possible, to stab the deceiving heart straight through, to sink his hand into guilty blood and splintered bone … and so powerful are his movements that when the blade catches and embeds itself in the dresser behind him—the dresser with the image and its candles—it lodges itself deeply in the wood.