“Come on in … There's some breakfast if you haven't had any, and if you have, get a broom and sweep. But be quiet, because we've got a customer still asleep in here.”

The old woman did not think to ask if Santa's sanitation documents were in order, nor did Santa explain that she had none. What for? The Sanitation Agents rarely showed their faces in fleabag establishments such as this. And even if they should be seized by the rare desire to initiate an investigation here, documentation enough to satisfy them could always be found somehow. Nothing else mattered, because the clientele of this den of iniquity had compelling personal reasons not to raise a stink if someone got them sick. At most, they would find the responsible woman and give her a good thrashing on one of the scary nearby streets or in one of the horrible little taverns where the women ply their trade. But they won't go to the police, no way, because that would be a losing proposition entirely for the customers who frequent this sort of establishment, an impressive crew, to put it mildly: professional thieves who hide what they have stolen in the brothel; deserters from the army who make a business of selling their uniforms and equipment there; carters, muleteers, and merchants of all stripes, all of them contrabandists; bankrupt businessmen whose tiny stores—more loaded with debts than merchandise—have been closed by the court; and shifty tough guys, the kind you see watching over a pulque shop, with no job at this stage, but plenty of money, a pistol, and lots of people they hate. Among the customers one might even encounter, though only exceptionally and by special permission from the owner, some poor convict recently emerged from Belén Prison, tired of waiting to find out if he would be executed or let off with a twenty-year sentence, waiting now in the brothel while his friends arrange the next step of his escape. It is a world apart, one that simultaneously distresses and fascinates us; a world without morals, or at least, of stunningly confused ones, where the very dregs can sometimes show surprising self-abnegation. But those are few against the many whose consciences gape cavernously empty; those who know only crime and speak only the argot of the streets. They are the scum that floats at the edges of the great cesspools of humanity called cities, the antisocial elements, as we say.

After closing and locking the door, the old woman demanded of Santa:

“What's your name?”

“Santa.”

“Santa … yeah, right! From now on it's Loreto.”

And even her enchanting name disappeared in the muck.

As far gone as Santa was, this inferno, surpassing anything she had expected or imagined could exist, completed her annihilation. What nights, what afternoons, what mornings, and what agony! When not in the embrace of some bandit, she was in the throes of the agony that ripped perpetually at her insides, or in the clutches of the cheap booze that she gulped by the bottleful, seeking unconsciousness, sprawled snoring in complete stupefaction on the sagging bed or even on the floor. And she watched what was happening to her, astonished and unresponsive, without protest or resistance, the way that we all do during our worst nightmares, the ones that seem never-ending and continue to make us tremble even after we awake from them, praying to God that such a thing should never, ever happen to us in real life.