Santa tried to drive the memories away by waving her hands in front of her, the way that back in her good times as a decent girl she had occasionally waved away the bees upon approaching their hive or fended off the most amorous doves when visiting the dovecote. But her memories did not go away. To the contrary, as if provoked by the snores of the drunk beside her, they rioted all around her, flitting in and out like fairy workers busily trying to reconstruct the temple of her innocence and the stronghold of her adolescence, both desolate and in ruins, but they only managed to make a knot in her throat, fill her eyes with tears, and wound her heart, a heart still much more virginal than her splendid young prostitute's body.

And that is why the sad, dark room was suddenly inundated with the light of her memories.

There it is … the little white house, hidden away on one of the narrow, unpaved lanes of her village, lanes flanked on both sides by thick foliage, flowers, and ivy that scales the high walls constructed here of brick and mortar, there of gently crumbling adobes. One enters—through a rustic wooden gate that presents no resistance to the slightest push—into a yard adorned only by the overarching sky and six orange trees, their boughs bending under their load of golden fruit or covered with white flowers that swoon with the power of their own fragrance. There is the well, deep, dark, echoing faintly with tiny mysterious sounds like a fairy cave, its water crystalline to the eye and icy to the taste, the nooks and crannies of its ancient stone rim colonized by daisies, its pulley whining terribly whenever the bucket descends into the depths. On one side of the smoky kitchen, with its wide-mouthed little chimney, is the bee hive, and on the other, higher up, the dovecote, although the doves prefer to spend their time in the branches of the nearby woods or the ruined tower of the chapel of San Antonio, also nearby. In back, a fat pig lies wallowing lazily in the mud, tethered by a leg; hens and their chicks scratch the dirt, looking up at the sky with a single eye, from time to time, by tilting their heads almost horizontally to the ground; and a large yellow and black dog, Coyote by name, dozes tranquilly in the thick shade of the orange trees. On the covered walkway that runs along the side of the house, to the left of the entrance, are various rustic chairs and stools, and there, too, hang the cages of various songbirds that fill the air with their harmonies and arpeggios each day from the first glimmer of light. On the wall, bull's horns serve as hooks from which to hang the bridle and other riding tack of the family's only horse, taken out each day to pasture along with cows and calves belonging to the owner of the local store. Tied to the posts that support each extreme of the covered walkway are two fighting cocks, one of them jet black and the other sporting yellow feathers on its wings and around its neck, both crowing and flapping their challenges to each other when not sharpening their beaks on the ground always wet, sooner or later, with drinking water from the rusty sardine can placed beside each bird, the can overturned in the course of some abortive practice attack.