On the afternoons when her mother had given permission, Santa would remove her shoes by the bigger of the two mill dams, and carrying them in her hands, with the current lapping avidly at her bare brown feet, she crossed the river on stepping stones placed there for that very purpose, and she reached the other side holding her breath for fear of the slight danger that she might slip and suffer, at most, an unintentional little splash in the water. At the edge of the Pedregal, she stopped, frightened a bit at the thought of its breadth and desolation. It was beautiful, certainly; but, my Lord, how deserted! One late afternoon when Santa had entered into her chaste and meditative communion with nature, a sudden melancholy invaded her spirit, a pressure in her chest that made her want to cry, and she burst into tears. Cosme, who was returning from pasturing the cows, came upon her in that situation, and neither he nor she could find an explanation for her sadness:

“Couldn't it be that you've done something wrong at home and you're afraid that your mother will punish you?” inquired the boy, dismounting from the chestnut horse and sitting down next to Santa, who was crying with her back against a tree. “Because that's what happens to me. I get very afraid before a whipping, and I feel like running away … look, way over there … where they can't whip me.”

No, that was not it. Everyone in Santa's house was always kind to her.

“My sadness is a sadness that comes from inside, from my body …”

“Ah … it comes from your body? Think it's the pox?”

The sadness lasted for several days, complicated by fatigue and a predisposition to weeping. Yet her mother and brothers did not seem to be surprised, and they redoubled their affectionate pampering of her, until one early morning, when Santa awoke with the farewell of Fabián and Esteban, the enigma was clarified.

“Mother,” she said to Agustina as soon as they were alone, “I must be really sick, because look how I've been bleeding in the night …”

“Shhh …,” replied the old woman, kissing Santa's forehead. “We don't talk about those things or show them to anybody … It's the way that God blesses you and makes you a woman!”

A woman, indeed, and a handsome one, better looking as she matured and developed, day by day. Her mother and brothers now began taking excessively good care of their little “queen of the house.” They began taking her for day trips into Mexico City, so that she would be familiar with the capital, where they could buy her treats using the tiny savings they had gleaned from secret economies done in her name. They began taking her on Sunday outings to nearby San Angel, to hear the military band that played in front of the town hall and see the metropolitan street cars arrive from the capital, full of well-dressed people eager for diversion. The whole family piled into the cart on those days: Coyote reconnoitering; Fabián and Esteban driving in their broad, gold-trimmed sombreros, tight-fitting pants, black jackets, fluttering red ties and blindingly white shirts showing in front, silk sashes around their waists, and new shoes of yellow suede on their feet; Agustina and Santa, their elegant passengers. Agustina dressed in the now old-fashioned style of her youth: soft wool petticoat; loose-fitting jacket; high shoes of fancy fabric; scarf pinned around her neck, extending in a triangle down her back; rebozo of English fabric over her head, smelling like quince, which was the perfume of her clothes chest; thick filigree earrings; and, on the hand that held her parasol, several simple gold rings, dulled and burnished by long wear. Santa, adorned by little more than her fifteen years, a tapered cotton dress just short enough to reveal her small, well-shod feet, rebozo over one shoulder, and her gleaming, velvet-black braids bare except for a single carnation.