When Rubio eventually learned of her activities and, after several rounds of drinking with and pardoning her, on the day when he threw her out of the house, brutally, pitilessly, once and for all—Santa was drunk. The coach driver recognized her and proposed to take her to Elvira's house, but she just staggered and laughed:

“No, not there … another one. There are so many … but make it a house where the girls cost at least eight pesos. I'm still worth at least that!”

Nine

Like decay or an infestation that has established itself and cannot be halted by anything or anybody, Santa's inevitable decline had begun, and it was to be rapid, frightful, and devastating.

She circled down through the city's shadowy circuits of cheap prostitution, one after another, pausing in each only long enough to taste its infinite bitterness, not long enough, even, to draw breath and brace herself, after a brief repose, to continue her descent, in fits and starts, falling and then stumbling to her feet, over and over, sick, alcoholic, and pitiable. To look at her, one would say that she felt her way along, timid and shrinking, the way one walks in darkness, not knowing where she would end up, trying to hurt herself as little as possible, because hurt was unavoidable, apparently resigned to her fate. The outward appearance of resignation was surely deceptive, however. Who knows what curses she growled to herself through those lips trembling with drunken hiccups, lips that spoke more openly only when the alcohol granted her relief enough to remember happier times in the past, in better days that were now gone forever …

From the night when Rubio repudiated her, indignant at her flagrant infidelity, Santa went down, down, down. Much more than simply canceling their apocryphal love nest, Rubio's repudiation sent her tumbling as if launched by a superhuman force, into the city's bottomless pit of corruption, its dark, pestilent sewers of vice and poverty. Down she went through the city's intestines, she and the rest of the effluvium, the cloudy, stinking waters that can go in only one direction, no matter how much they may resist, protesting and whirling in the foul concavities completely unknown to the people on the street above, roaring and foaming uselessly before descending, again, with a sinister glug glug glug, into pipes that will strangle them even more. Down go the sewer waters, gathering volume as they blindly go to they-know-not-where, gurgling against the slimy walls of the tubes in which the incessant torrent of waste gradually etches marks like unblinking leprous eyes that are condemned to stare perpetually in the dark. Down go the sewer waters, mysterious, without a glint of reflected light, full of microbes and detritus, lethal and nauseating, unknowable, unnamable, emitting a heavy odor and a mournful, tired whisper that rises through the drains to the street above. And finally, out of the city they flow, away from its busy denizens, expelled through the iron grate into the rivers that will carry them to die in the sea, their shroud and tomb. The sea alone remembers that these waters were born, crystalline and pure, in the mountains where they quenched thirst and brought forth crops from the fertile countryside, where they were dew, perfume, and life itself.