“If you don't change, Santita, we're through! I swear that I'm not going to come after you anymore or even care what happens to you!”

To eliminate witnesses, he often sent Jenaro out for coffee with a shot of liquor, the only breakfast that the girl's disordered stomach could tolerate, and once, when he was alone with Santa, he threw himself at her deliriously, menacingly, unrecognizably:

“Me! Me!” he shouted, “When will it be my turn? I'm dying for you! Me, Santita. Take pity on me. If I wait any longer, there won't be anything left for me. Everybody steps on you as if you were a cobblestone in the street … And here I am, adoring you, and listening to it happen, and what do I get? … No, Santita, whatever happens, today it's my turn!”

There were a few moments of struggle, actual wrestling. Santa's only advantage was her sight, still healthy and sharp, while Hipólito flailed randomly in the pitch black of his blindness. Santa finally broke free of him, put the bed between them like a parapet, and, breathing very hard, she declared:

“No, Hipo, for God's sake! You're a good man. You deserve better from me than to have me the way I am now. No, I said … no!” she continued to protest, running away from him, semi-naked and totally terrified by the blind man, whose appearance at the moment was more horrifying than ever: his eyes enormously wide, his nostrils flaring and his mouth compressed, crouching like a tiger ready to pounce, his cane gone, his arms opening wide and desperately, repeatedly, closing around nothing, huffing and puffing like a caged beast.

“No, Hipo, no!” repeated Santa, fleeing back and forth from one end of the room to another, Hipólito gaining on her little by little, his arms outstretched ahead of him like the antennas of a monstrous spider, wordlessly, frenetically pursuing the fugitive body that he could not see, the body whose whereabouts he detected with a blind man's acute hearing, the body whose nudity he smelled with his unreasoning, long-suffering frenzy, the body toward which he stretched his trembling arms in a supreme quest for relief …

The struggle became fierce and implacable, as if between sworn enemies. Gone were adored and adorer, gone the adoration that had bound them. Instead, there was only the primitive, eternal combat between the male pursuer and the female who rejects his advances. Now and again, one could hear the soft, rasping protests of Santa—“No! No!”—confused with the sound of Hipólito's feet dragging on the brick floor … Then Santa slipped and fell, and two cries followed—her cry of terror and his cry of victory—and then … then, merely panting, and the wrestling began anew, the blind man on top, bruising the idolized flesh that belonged to everyone but him, forcing himself on her like a gorilla, Santa surrendering, dominated, awaiting his furious attack with the silent passivity of her sex, physiologically constituted to absorb such defeats …