“Hipo! Hipo! This doesn't look like a hospital at all! It's so nice that it makes me think I really am going to get better.”

After the paperwork of admissions and, of course, prior payment, Santa was installed in bed number eleven in a ward located near the operating room. Like the rest of the hospital, the ward was as clean as could be, with a total of twenty beds arranged symmetrically down both sides, each bed flanked by a varnished nightstand that contained various prosaic necessities of patients' bodies, such as bedpans.

At one end of the long room, a table with various other utensils and books, a couple of rooms for the nursing staff, and, hanging on the wall, a large sculpted crucifix; at the other end, a large, unfinished automatic washer of nickel and marble. A subtle odor of disinfectants. Perfectly graduated ventilation. Clarity and spaciousness. People speak automatically in a soft voice, and their shoes do not clump on the floor. Various patients, all of them women, raise their heads to look curiously at the new arrivals, then plunge them back into the pillows. From a corner, a muffled, rhythmic moaning. A dressed woman seated on the edge of one of the beds coughs, spits into a receptacle that she herself raises to her mouth, wipes her lips with a handkerchief, and starts to cough again. Propped up on the pillows of another bed, one can see the thin frame of another woman, with angular shoulders and arms as thin as a child's. Her hands rest on the folded sheet above her swollen belly, and her fingers move the beads of a rosary as, with sunken eyes and bloodless lips the color of dry dirt, she recites the litany without quite forming the words, as if she were ruminating on their meaning.

Santa has been describing all this to Hipólito—who holds tightly on to her—from their entrance into the hospital to their arrival at her bed. There they say goodbye. He'll be back in the afternoon.

He and Jenaro are told, on their way out, that the operation will be at seven o'clock the next morning. They tremble to hear it. Without saying a word, they exit the hospital under the curious gaze of its employees and staff.

“Where are we going, patrón?” asks Jenaro as they cross the threshold of that painful place.

“To hell!” vomits the blind man, with a cracked voice.

And the insolent word echoes in the small, quiet plaza.

Without a fixed plan, they wandered through indifferent streets brimming with the life of the immense, unfeeling city.

The visit that afternoon was less a comfort than a torment. They could hardly talk in that room full of suffering and witnesses. They could not even mention their love, which had been converted by this unjust contrary alignment of stars into a cruel joke. They could not risk revealing that they were not brother and sister, the false family relationship that Hipólito had declared so he could visit and be present during operation. So they just held hands and never seemed to tire of that simple contact, so innocent and so loving at the same time.