Santa experienced all of that, and more. She became familiar with social types and circumstances that many city dwellers live their entire lives without ever encountering firsthand, no matter how faithfully they may have read newspapers, fulfilled their jury duty, or cultivated relations with the police and authorities. Santa experienced it all as a requisite of her profession, because cheap prostitutes often function as discrete, natural intermediaries between criminals and the law.

Her current domicile, located on the far southeastern outskirts of the city beyond the old monasteries of Monserrate and San Jerónimo, had a staff of no fewer than seven harpies, not counting Santa. The room with the crumbling walls was therefore divided by a number of partitions: two main ones down the middle with a narrow passageway between them, and various lateral partitions that created a series of cubicles on each side. The lateral partitions were tacked precariously to the main ones and to the crumbling walls with bits of wire, wood, and greasy cord. The furniture of the establishment consisted of dark, rickety, sagging beds with withered, half-empty mattresses and pillows, and a wobbly chair or two, their cane seats sunken and broken through. Fixed invariably to the wall of each cubicle like an icon of the barbarous religion practiced therein, one could observe a dented platter, made apparently of pewter, the metal hidden by stains and crusts nothing could ever remove, and on the platter, a nauseating towel the hanging tips of which oscillated slightly like a noose on the gallows whenever one of the women or their visitors closed the door. At the end of the narrow passageway between the two main partitions, on the wall above a small table with an oil lamp that flickered there day and night, was a photograph of a saint's image that seemed almost sacrilegious in that setting, tacked up by its four corners and surrounded by paper flowers and a few votive offerings.

Here Santa ended up after she was thrown out of everywhere else, racked by pain and poverty, half drunk, glassy-eyed, her splendid body swollen where her bones did not protrude, ragged and ruined.

“Do you have room for one more?” she asked the old woman who opened the small, worm-eaten, much-mended door when Santa knocked on it. The old woman was wrapped in a shawl, with bits of soap stuck to her temples as a cure for headache. She puffed on a cigarette butt and reeked of cheap lavender perfume.

For a moment, she did not reply. Meanwhile the sun bathed the sidewalk and generously entered the doorway of the poor establishment as well. The old woman submitted Santa to a visual inspection, somewhat impeded by the puffy eyelids that half-closed her eyes. Then she extended hands reminiscent of clusters of knotty vines, revealing forearms so thin, with skin so parchment-like, that they could have belonged to an Egyptian mummy. The hands unfolded themselves like trained tarantulas to explore Santa's hips, thighs, and breasts through her dress, then lifted her skirt slightly before their owner finally spoke again: