Rubio's behavior, no matter how mystifying to Santa, was actually commonplace and easily explicable. Stuck in a loveless marriage, not unlike the great majority of marriages, he had supposed that a lover of Santa's caliber would ease his pain and deliver some of the sweet pleasures he believed that he was owed. So, instead of trying to fix his marriage, thanks to the comfortable and accommodating moral code by which such things are easily excused, he headed straight for a brothel like a sick man going to a pharmacy, in hopes that money would provide a cure. The ultimate store-bought treatment—more palatable and, hopefully, more efficacious than the brothel—was his expensive mistress with her own house. And at first, it worked. He absorbed the idea that Santa belonged only to him and set about trying to kiss away the indelible marks of so many thousands of kisses that fallen like hail on her voluptuous body. There was even something provocative about how much she had been kissed and caressed by others, about how her docile, bought-and-paid-for flesh resembled a coin that has forever lost its pristine shine by circulating in fairs and markets and accumulating the fingerprints of countless rough hands. It did not take long, though, for Rubio to decide that all the brothel's medicines are inefficacious—even Santa, from whose skin the deep impressions of others' kisses and caresses could never, never be erased. The perennial human desire to be the first and a horrendous retrospective jealousy broke the bond between them. Exasperated with his wife, Rubio became just as exasperated with his mistress. He went back and forth between them, hoping one of them would change and suddenly give him everything he wanted until, faced with a double disappointment, inconsolable, he became enraged and cursed them both, although with different language and manners. He told himself that he still respected his wife and that his relationship with his mistress was simply carnal. Two distinct and compatible sorts of affection, according to the hypocritical rationalization of middle-class men like Rubio. The two women, on the other hand, treated him much the same, which made him even angrier. As if they knew and advised each other, as if both were formed of the same stuff and necessarily approached their sentimental conflicts in parallel ways, though separated by a vast gulf, and though one was of alabaster and the other of common clay, they had similar reactions and opinions, the same reticence and silences. Their greetings and goodbyes seemed identical to him. And so he quoted an idea that he had read somewhere, he had forgotten where, by which he was pleased to insult them both at once:

“Among women, there is no hierarchy of moral quality, only hierarchies of social class. Inside, all women are alike!”

Because love is alloyed with hate, it starts with desire and concludes, not with the satisfaction of that desire, but with disgust. This disgust does not reveal itself directly, but rather, in a certain tortuous twist of word and deed, or sometimes, subdued by the power of suggestion, it expresses itself only as silence or as a repetition of the carnal act, in which we engage not so much to possess our lovers a second time as to convince ourselves that we really love them. At the edge of the pleasure of sensual delight lies satiation, and at the edge of the carnal act lies violence, although most men fortunately do not reach that point. All men, however, without exception, no matter how in love they may be, experience occasional moments of repugnance toward their adored one. Momentary repugnance aside, though, almost all reflexively defend their mates from other males, just the way wild beasts, whether in their lairs or at the zoo, ferociously defend the flesh that lies at their feet, torn by their claws and half-devoured, long after they are satiated.