Rubio passed through all of psychic states, each of them aggravated by the fact that he had never really loved Santa. The tenderness of the first days, during which lovers happily divulge their deepest secrets and swear eternal fidelity, now filled him with embarrassment. Feeling degraded and delinquent in this relationship with a lowly prostitute, he turned on his confidant and vilified her in revenge. He had told her everything, relieving himself of the bile that his wife had unloaded onto him, the lethal, colorless melancholy of a loveless marriage. Dismayed to find that his mistress was just another woman, he vilified her, not because she was a prostitute, but because he had been weak and indiscreet:

“Don't get too stuck on yourself because I've told you things I shouldn't. And don't think you can use those secrets against me, either. Nobody would believe you because of what you are!”

There was the horrible affront that she hated most, the cursed name, fluttering in the air, written on the walls, the furniture. Santa saw it everywhere and sometimes read it aloud …

Santa began to despise Rubio. And to think that she might have been able to love him if he had taken advantage of her previous sympathies! She did not leave him immediately, with all his pesos and all his coarseness, because she refused to return to Elivra's house, where she now felt unwelcome, and because she was equally unwilling to go to a similar or an inferior house, where she would be admitted because of her queenly reputation but would also be resented for that very reason and would be at the mercy of that resentment.

And there was another problem, too. Santa felt the insidious attack of the illness that had signaled its onset with her pneumonia. Strange and alarming symptoms, atrocious hemorrhages accompanied by a heaviness in her abdomen, pain radiating from her kidneys and the musculature of her groin and lower pelvis.

“What could it be, Hipo?” she asked the musician, who had no idea of her unhappiness, despite the frequency with which he and Jenaro visited her. “I haven't been to the doctor because it would give Rubio the wrong idea, and I don't want to go back to Elvira's house.”

Hipólito clarified nothing. He promised to get her miraculous herbs supplied by folk healers in the marketplace.

So Santa began to drink more, much more, than the moderate intake of alcohol recommended for her convalescence, gradually upping the daily dose of everything from fine cognac to corrosive raw rum. She slipped into alcoholism, or rather, she threw herself intentionally into the river of forgetfulness, regarding it as the only balm adequate to her need and within her means.

Because of her deeply rooted habit (and who can blame the ex-prisoner who persists in dragging the foot that was attached for years to a ball and chain?), because of the alcohol, because she was sick, and because she was desperate, she also cheated on Rubio. She cheated on him frantically, constantly, wherever she could, in the street, in rental carriages, even in the house that he rented for her. And after each event of her recidivism, she drank and drank and, occasionally, cried out with the pain of her strange, alarming symptoms.