“Santa! I'm leaving, get the chestnut horse out here!” shouts the boy from the lane, without looking at her or at the cattle, who continue their lazy march, because he is so intensely occupied untangling his sling with teeth and fingernails. Santa shoos the chestnut through the gate, unencumbered by saddle or bridal, and says to the boy:

“Careful, Cosme! Don't gallop him or get him too hot … Want some milk?”

“Just give me some and you'll see! Don't you have any honey from your bees? It makes stale bread taste wonderful,” says Cosme, as he takes a length of cord from around his waist to improvise a lead for the horse.

Santa goes to the house and returns with a glass of frothy milk in one hand and, in the other, a slice of bread spread with honey that hangs off its edges in transparent threads that never reach the ground. Cosme drains the glass of milk, runs his tongue around his lips, seizes the honeyed crust of bread, and throws himself onto the chestnut horse, squeezing its flanks with his bare heels. The old horse responds with a canter despite its years, and the boy, prodigiously balanced atop the bounding animal, twists his upper body back toward Santa as he takes a bite of the bread.

“Don't get mad, Santa. I'm only going fast now because the cows are getting away from me. As soon as I catch up …”

The rest of his sentence is inaudible as he disappears around a bend in the lane, the horse now at a full gallop, Cosme leaning far forward the way circus riders do in the ring.

It is not yet seven o'clock, and yet, the sun leaning over the mountain ridge turns the tree tops golden, peers here and there into the houses, and casts absurdly long shadows of everything that it finds, making a rose bush seem antediluvian, an ordinary dog appear a hulking dinosaur, and a tree trunk many leagues in length. With the glinted reflections of the river and the floral aroma exuded by all nature—even leaving aside the ripple of water, the singing of birds, and the rustle of the wind in the trees—there is something impalpable that floats on the air and rises like a wordless prayer that the earth, eternally wounded, thinks and utters upon awaking each morning, a profound prayer of thanksgiving for having escaped, for one more night, the cataclysm that hangs over it and that will finally, treacherously come to mutilate it and annihilate its sacred, infinite, maternal fecundity … Full of these impressions, Santa lifts her eyes to the heavens, her nostrils flaring, and stands motionless, almost ecstatic, herself an unconscious part of the earth's wordless prayer of thanksgiving.

During the day, there were always chores to do, whether at home helping old Agustina, or by the river washing clothes and shopping at don Samuel's store that “has everything.” As evening came, Santa and other girls her age would take over the village square, where they frolicked and romped without machos around to make fun of them at that hour, unless one wanted to count the small boys emerging from Father Guerra's catechism class or, even less probably, Father Guerra himself, who, upon bidding farewell to his pupils and turning to the girls, normally fussed at them amicably: