How beautifully he played, and how ugly he was, his face pockmarked and unshaven, his grey mustache droopy, his forehead wide, his jaw powerful, his neck thick, his shirt filthy and in want of mending at its frayed collar and cuffs, his tie crooked and hidden, for the most part, by his vest. The blind piano player's long fingernails were yellowed by cigarette smoke, and his hands were boney, but they were also agile and expressive, sometimes flitting back and forth between the black and white keys so rapidly that, to Santa, his fingers seemed to multiply, sometimes lingering on a single key so lovingly that its note stood out from the rest, as if sounding more vigorously of its own accord.

With a blind man's instinct, the musician sensed the presence of someone at his side, and in spite of the noisy dancing that had begun, he half turned his head toward Santa, who felt repelled by the unseeing gaze of his horrid whitish eyes, orphaned without sight.

“We're not going to make much tonight if it keeps raining,” he said, not hesitating to equate himself professionally with the women. “Who's dancing?”

“I don't know them,” replied Santa, trying to avoid the eyes that, although blind, nonetheless appeared to look intelligently around the room, with expressive inflections of the eyebrows.

“Pardon me,” he said, “I thought I was speaking to someone of the house.”

“I just got here today. Hey …” began Santa, but stopped with a cry, feeling arms slide around her waist from behind.

It was nothing, just one of the gentlemen mentioned earlier, who, incited by the delicious lines of Santa's hips, had come from behind to examine them, hugging her waist and sinking his chin into one of her soft shoulders …

“What's the fuss about, good looking? You'd think I was hurting you! Come dance and have a drink with us.”

“I don't want a drink, and I don't know how to dance,” answered Santa dryly, after extricating herself from the grasp of the not-so-young man, who was well-dressed and seemed well-respected by his companions.

“Goodbye! And what if I pay you to get me drunk and dance naked with me if that's what I want? Do you think I'm begging? Do you think that any slut can give me orders? Well, you're mistaken! I've got enough money here to buy you all!”

The mood of the gathering suddenly changed. The piano player terminated the dance with an artful transition to a couple of resolving chords that softened the brusqueness of the interruption, and, aided only by his sense of touch, philosophically lit a cigarette. Santa, who did not yet have other weapons with which to defend herself, resorted to tears, but her comrades, and one, above all, called la Gaditana because she was from Cádiz, leapt to Santa's defense:

“Hey, buddy, who do you think you are? What makes you so special that we should put up with you, huh?”

Pepa, her cigar hanging from her lip and her money bag from her wrist, intervened. She spoke to the companions of the man—who persisted in his affirmations that he had a lot of money and exhibited various denominations to prove it—and his companions, while mortified, declined to recognize their friend's rudeness and insisted on his behalf that he ought to be pardoned because he had drunk a bit too much and because he was, after all, the governor, no less, of a rich and distant state of the republic.