Her only consolation in these dark days was to leave the brothel and spend some free time at the “Siesta for the Tired” tavern on Regina Square, that did not close until after midnight. It was the refuge of a multihued crowd of all kinds of folk, shiftless veterans of life on the street, who were in there drinking for at least six hours every night, from the hour of evening prayers to twelve o'clock, when the joint was jumping. Was it here, at this tavern, or was it from the convict who had escaped from Belén Prison, who stayed up all of one night with her, that Santa learned the dance lyrics that she sang so ceaselessly for a time? Who knows, because people sang plenty at the tavern, with guitars and everything, and the murderer (the world is like this) treated Santa with an almost feminine tenderness, confessing why he had killed, and even telling her about a woman he loved and about a child, a little baby, whose whereabouts he did not know. The couple on the other side of the partition from Santa and the convict later told how they heard crying and the whispered sharing of confidences all night, and how, at one point, the guy just burst into song, overcome by the liquor or his sorrows. So it is not known where she learned the popular dance melody that she hummed stubbornly, repeatedly, tonelessly, as if in supplication, as if she hoped that the sweetness of the melody and the magic of the rhyme might guarantee the truth of the lyrics. Our popular dances provide a suitable musical accompaniment for dying individuals and disappearing races!

One verse promised such sweet mercy in heaven (“They say the dead always rest in peace / 'Cause there's no suffering beyond the sky”) that Santa repeated it a thousand times, obsessed now with death and certain of the peace that the lyrics promised. She sang the rest of the stanza without much conviction, however, merely to complete the rhyme: “Our bodies die, but our souls live on / And my soul is yours, oh why, oh why?” And sometimes, when she got to these last words, or even more often, to the mention of “blind passion” in another verse, Santa saw the image of blind Hipólito, looking at her with his horrid whitish eyes of a bronze statue without patina. The apparition always dissolved before Santa could tell what it meant. Did her soul want Hipólito to rescue her, or was her soul already in his power somehow?

Before she had solved this riddle, her illness progressed to its final and most intense phase. Truly in its grip, she could not make a movement or take a step in the hellhole where she lived without emitting wails that no amount of attempted muffling could conceal from the other women and their customers, or from Santa's own soul. There were times when, unable to walk, she dragged herself across the floor to the bed and lay their pulling and tearing at her soiled clothing, crying, imploring clemency from the men who still wanted to rent her body: