For that reason, when, during one of their daily and supposedly casual conversations, Santa told him quite urgently and seriously that he must speak to Agustina about their relationship, Second Lieutenant Marcelino Beltrán simply laughed his frank and impudent twenty-two-year-old laugh and caressed the girl's chin, while simultaneously slashing through the stems of various inoffensive flowers with a sidelong swipe of his riding crop:

“And why should I say anything to your mother when I've already said everything directly to you?”

He had, indeed, said everything to Santa, from the innocent and apparently candid words with which such men normally commence their love-making, to the ardent expressions that come later, pronounced in a murmur, with hands clasped, faces close together, eyes locked, lips parched, and spirit ravished. Eventually, by tacit agreement, as soon as Santa glimpsed Marcelino's spotted horse approaching on the wide road to San Angel, she would duck into the back lanes of her village, and hurriedly, without pausing to return the greeting of anyone she met, she would take the longest but most deserted route to the edge of the Pedregal. Marcelino would join her there, and looking frequently back to see who might be spying on them, they would enter the wasteland together. Once within the Pedregal, of course, there was no one to spy on them. The birds that flew up at the couple's approach did not look at them twice, nor did the bushes or the trees that whispered God-knows-what confidences to one another in their secret language of rustling boughs, known to the Druids, perhaps, but to no other human beings. Her instincts of self-preservation led Santa to keep Marcelino at a distance that her crafty lover respected at first, while he swore by all that was holy that no wicked intention or appetite motivated him, while he simply repeated in a soft monotone, the sweet, familiar song:

“I love you so much, Santa … so, so much, in a way I've never loved before and never expect to love again …”

Santa did not answer. How could she have answered? Her blood seemed to drain away from her head, her heart felt ready to burst out of her, and her voice formed a knot in her throat, so that, were it somehow to find its way to her mouth, it would surely be transformed into little more than sobs of happiness? What she did do was simply close her eyes to keep the world from spinning around her and breathe quickly, quickly, in order not to suffocate. If she had answered, it would have been to beg him to say it again: the ancient lie that men always utter and women always believe, the never-kept promise of eternal love and fidelity!

The Pedregral itself was the couple's discrete and cooperative accomplice, with its remote corners and hiding places that offered unsurpassed protection from prying eyes, unlike any of the other places around Chimalistac ordinarily employed for lovers' trysts, where a suspicious passerby, the sudden approach of the Churubusco streetcar, or any other trivial but unexpected circumstance might betray them. Only the Pedregal itself witnessed Santa's slow, inexorable surrender. First, she let Marcelino hold her hand, then let him put his arm around her waist, then put his head in her lap in order, the rascal affirmed, “the better to look at her.” Finally, the kisses: first, she let him kiss her hands, “just her hands, nothing more,” then, her neck, with soft, diabolical kisses that barely brushed the skin, then her mouth, the moist, parted lips of the girl, who shuddered with the feeling of pleasure and, abruptly, tried to escape, trembling and imploring: