“No,” answered Hipólito, coming back to the door. “Not tonight, and not tomorrow … Goodbye, Santita!”

When a river floods destructively, it can drag even enormous boulders with it, and massive tree trunks will ride the green flanks and foamy crests of its bellowing torrent, tumbling, submerging, and reappearing helplessly in demented flight toward the sea, despite their proud weight and strength. An insignificant bit of straw, however, torn from its roots, may wrap itself around a snag as insignificant as itself and survive the flood in place, as if the river pitied the weakness of both straw and snag and respected their solidarity. Eventually the waters subside, the current returns to its gentle, beneficent course, and the boulders and massive trunks are nowhere to be seen, but behold the bit of straw bent around its snag, trembling now in the breeze, weak, humble, and insignificant as ever, still ringed by foamy kisses from the passing torrent, kisses that, like the ones left by lips, fade very quickly, no matter how eternal the act of kissing may have seemed. But take away the snag, and the straw will be swept away infinitely faster and more completely than the boulders or tree trunks.

So it was with Santa. With Hipólito out of the picture, she plummeted toward the abyss at a vertiginous rate, wretched, ridiculed, friendless, and hurting. Descending the slope bristling with thistles, lurch by lurch, her disintegrating body finally landed in a stinking hole where each trick sold for half a peso: a snake pit, a stronghold of hoodlums and criminals, a factory of diseases. She landed in a room that was itself malformed, misshapen, two of its crumbling walls seeming to collide at an odd angle, forming a corner in which both walls threatened to collapse, or rather, had already commenced to do so, to judge by the handfuls of dust and chunks of material the size of fists shaken down from the edge of the ceiling by the rumbling passage of heavily loaded trucks that filled the streets of the peripheral neighborhood, busily coming and going like monstrous, industrious ants during eight hours of every day.

Santa landed here after a thorough tour of the very worst that the great city has to offer, the infectious social rot, the itchy rash that only the police dare to scratch. The well-off residents of luxurious neighborhoods feel the itch, and it keeps them from resting easy, but they fear contamination. Scratching the itch can spread the contagion. If the itch becomes unbearable and the police scratch the infection, they will rouse and scatter the social lepers who shelter there, and the famine-racked frames and delinquent physiognomies of these pariahs will soon be seen in the neatly paved streets of the city's central district, ogling its sumptuous constructions and fancy shops. The bare feet, suspicious looks, and hesitant gestures of the social lepers mark them as refugees of the recent police raid on the outskirts of the city, totally out of place here, like lice that one happens to see on an expensive garment worn by a well-washed person. Feeling exposed, the human lice move quickly, silently, singly rather than in groups, never stopping, families dissolving in fear, the mother over here, the father over there, the children wherever. They all know where they are going: to some other poor peripheral neighborhood, back into the lonely shadows on a different side of the city. The important thing is not to be noticed as they traverse the light. They hope to pass anonymously, concealed by the noise of the traffic, by the hustle and bustle, praying that the owners and masters of all this will be distracted by the daily concerns of work and diversion. Woe to him or her who fails to escape attention and gets detained by the authorities. No friends or family members will stop to find out why, or try to help, and possibly share the same fate. No. They continue furtively toward the distant endpoint of their flight.