Very few words. Santa looks at Hipólito and finds him decidedly handsome. Hipólito tries to get his eyes to see Santa and, failing, he shuts his eyelids and presses his chin into his chest tightly enough, one would think, to bore a hole. Jenaro, sitting on the floor, watches them both.

It took every ounce of Hipólito's willpower to make himself go play piano that night at Elvira's house, but in view of the nights he had already missed, he could not afford to stay away again and thus lose the job that provided his livelihood. There were too many nocturnal pianists with whom Elvira could easily replace him. Once he was there, though, it was not a bad way to kill the time. What would he have done in his apartment without Santa there, counting the minutes that had to pass before the moment of supreme danger? So he just stayed up, willingly playing on for additional hours on the upstairs piano that the police could not detect from the street, until, at five o'clock, with the dawn, with Jenaro, and with fifteen pesos extra in his pocket, he finally stepped back into the street—dragging his feet, as if by walking slowly he could retard the arrival of the fatal moment. Mostly for Jenaro's sake, he consented to stop at a recently opened little place for two steaming bowls of coffee with milk, which they drank without either of them touching the bread they were served. And there on the filthy bench where they sat having this breakfast, they heard church bells ringing half past six o'clock.

As they rounded the corner to enter the plaza in front of the hospital, Hipólito halted and, timorously and innocently, as if his guide held the keys of life and death, he asked the boy:

“Is Santa going to die, Jenaro?”

The boy, never suspecting that he was addressing one of the great mysteries of creation, answered simply:

“Why should she die, if she doesn't hurt anybody by living?”

Surrounded by doctors, nurses, and aids with their sleeves rolled up and wearing surgical aprons, Santa was about to receive the anesthesia.

“Hipo, thank God!” was her greeting. “I thought you might be too late!”

White as a sheet of paper, disoriented as a blind man, and unsteady as a drunk, bumping into this fellow and that without excusing himself or even saying hello, Hipólito let go of Jenaro and ran to the bed. Santa's arms caught hold of the piano player and guided him to her lips, to the great surprise of those who stood around them observing the emotional display of this “brother and sister.” The surgeon finally separated them, handed to the anesthetist the mask through which Santa would inhale the chloroform, and told Hipólito:

“Calm down, my friend. If not, you can't be present for the operation. Remember what you promised …”

They placed the mask on Santa's face and began to administer the first drops of anesthetic. One could still hear her murmur, inside the mask: