“Go on, hija, and the best of luck … but don't get too stuck up, and don't let this one go. Hold on to the money, and try not to lose your looks in case someday you need to come back to the brothel …”

Hipólito could hardly resist telling Santa everything she did not know! He managed to contain himself, however. If she did not hear the good news, she could more easily forget the torero, who would soon return to Spain, where distance and the passage of years would eventually erase all memory of his love affair with a Mexican girl. If she did not hear the bad news, it would not spoil the start of her new life.

Hipólito would not forget, however, how a steady stream of telegrams had arrived from Rubio, who was in Puebla during the worst of Santa's illness and who, in the absence of any response, began to think himself betrayed. Or how Elvira had opened the telegrams, discovered that Santa was planning a second escape from her clutches, and determined to toss her out of the house immediately. Did Santa imagine that Elvira would keep her around indefinitely, in bed by herself all day, without working for her room and board? To the hospital, the ingrate! Elvira had been unmoved by all entreaties, quarreling savagely with Pepa, shaking her fists at the girls, coming very close to ejecting poor Hipólito with her own hand. What a beast!

The good part of the story was personified by el Jarameño, no less, and whether or not Hipólito wanted to admit it, he had to give credit where credit was due. Explain it any way you like. Perhaps the matador just had to see her. Perhaps it was the approach of his departure for Spain that made him wish to part with his ex-mistress as friends. The only thing certain is that, without knowing of Santa's illness, he had appeared at Elvira's on the night following the trial to inform himself, so he claimed, of whether the girls had all become jailbirds or had remained on the loose and returned to the trenches. In reality, he was looking for Santa, about whom, though he did not even inquire about her, the girls soon provided detailed information. She was really, really sick with pneumonia and the doctor could not guarantee she would survive. El Jarameño's first reaction was incredulity and indifference:

“Is that right? Well, I'm sure that she's got something in her bag of tricks for the pneumonia, for the doctor, and for the doctor's mother, too. Don't pull my leg …”

He did not believe it, not when Pepa confirmed it, not when Hipólito corroborated the testimony of everyone else, not when he saw how the musician, in order to avoid bothering the sick woman but still obey Elvira's command to play, had put half a dozen newspapers on the strings inside the piano to mute the sound. The clients actually liked the result.