The piano player's chattiness was carefully graduated, bland and indifferent at first, increasingly entertaining as he and Santa reviewed their recollections of the night of the murder. They spoke of the presentiments that one always imagines having felt before important events, harbingers invented ex post facto, for the most part. They said what they had thought at the moment of the crime, what it later brought to their minds, how poorly they slept afterward, and how they had felt the imminent possibility of their own deaths. She had thought she was wounded by the first shot! He had heard the second bullet whine close by! They spoke of what haunted them subsequently: Hipólito, of the brief, hoarse groan of the dying man in his agony; Santa, of the glassy-eyed stare of the cadaver. Finally, a mutual confession, softly uttered, followed by an expression of philosophical acceptance:

“How low we have sunk in life, Hipo!”

“Low, Santita, so low …”

Persuaded of their reciprocal lowness, they moved closer together, sitting side by side in a corner of the waiting room, without anyone to hear them except Jenaro, who hardly seemed an outside presence at all. As the conversation gained color and flavor, Jenaro could have sworn that the hands of Hipólito and Santa clasped and unclasped as if of their own accord, unconsciously. The blind man was determined to find out whether Santa loved Rubio, or rather, intended to become his mistress for merely practical reasons. Santa insisted that Hipólito declare whether, no matter what she did, his love for her was really eternal. Neither of them was willing to put all the cards on the table, however, and instead preferred to talk about past unhappiness, each hoping that the other would confess having suffered less. Their obsessive inspection of wretchedness and melancholy experience seemed a way of establishing a claim on future happiness. In plain language, they were saying: “If you love me, let it not be for my deserving, for I deserve nothing. Love me, instead, because I have suffered so much in this life!”

Outside, the public continued to mill around, standing on tiptoe to get a better eyeful and earful, and the policeman who stood near the window continued to shoo away the occasional nosy onlooker who approached the window grate to wink at the woman flesh in the witness room.

Inside the main courtroom, the trial continued, interminable, bound by the plethora of formalities and mandatory procedures of a trial by jury—that highly imperfect, sometimes hare-brained institution of justice. At one point when a bailiff entered the waiting room to see if “the girls” needed anything, Santa and Hipólito could hear various garbled phrases corresponding to the prosecution or the defense—“conscientious, up-standing gentlemen of the jury,” “public retribution,” “a mother who must now weep for her son”—phrases applicable to both killer and deceased, phrases that might be intoned with equal plausibility by the prosecutor or the defense attorney. Santa and Hipólito returned to their conversation as Jenaro dozed.