The dawn of the time that Santa and Rubio lived together was like sunup on a day without clouds, bathed in a powerful celestial light that lifts the spirit and beautifies everything—fields, houses, streets—makes diamonds of common stones, fills muddy puddles with molten gold and inanimate objects with an inner life, the kind of sunlight capable of turning black into white, old into young, and illness into health, capable of cleansing the discoloration of centuries from the ancient bells in church towers and the pockmarked façades of the oldest buildings, a sunshine that lovingly warms the flowers in the city parks and the wretched beings who shiver there, kissing the half-naked children of the half-built outskirts, allowing them to forget their wretchedness, smile, and laugh. They were happy together for just one month, a month during which Santa could forget, smile, and laugh. She forgot all the things whose memories could hurt her (which were many) and smiled and laughed at all the gratifying things of the present (which, for a time, were even more). It was less a convalescence, less a progression of pains, residues, and worries, than an ineffable rebirth, the start of new existence, wonderful and previously undreamt of. Not only did her still beautiful but not-so-immaculate body, quite used to the company of elegant lovers like Rubio, gradually recover a semblance of its former vitality—a vitality now borrowed, however, on an account owned by death—her soul gradually recovered a bit of the innocence that vice, veiled now in the cobwebs of forgetfulness, had sullied. It was like getting a new body and soul, fashioned by an expert, that fit her perfectly in all ways, without a wrinkle of any kind, the precise measure of her needs and desires.

Rubio was not what you call madly in love with her, of course … she knew that. And so what? He wasn't exactly a kid, and she was still getting her bearings. We can see what happens …

But, oh my, how the developments of months two and three disheartened Santa! The dawn of her sunlit day, with its powerful celestial light, simply evaporated, as often occurs on gorgeous spring days that sudden, unforeseen storms transform into something lugubrious, and rain falls implacably like a wet blanket on the spirit, a transparent funeral veil that covers fields and towns, closing the horizon and imprisoning our desires. In just such a momentary transformation, all Santa's castles in the air came crashing down. Not only did Rubio not love her, he ridiculed her. Each time that the prostitute took a step toward the unreachable Promised Land and felt herself almost there, each time that her convalescent soul spread its clumsy wings, numb from neglect but growing stronger day by day, trying to launch itself in flight once more—Rubio took it upon himself to bring her down with vicious terms of scorn.

“Prostitutes don't get into the Promised Land. Can you imagine? And the souls of fallen women can't fly because they don't have wings. They're wingless souls!”