“Tell me what's troubling you, sweetie pie, and you won't be sorry.”

Just then Marcelino appeared with angry looks for both Santa and her interlocutor, who abruptly stepped back, did an about-face, and vanished into the building.

“What are you doing here, Santa? What do you want?”

“How dare you ask me what I want?”

“Okay, okay, let's not talk here,” interrupted Marcelino. “Go someplace else, any place you want, and I'll follow you.”

Like an arrow, Santa crossed the square crowded with partiers, descended the ramp by the streetcar stop, passed a gambling den beside which musicians and curious onlookers stood around in the shade, and, reaching the street, turned left toward the open countryside, in the direction of Tlacopac. But, instead of the recriminations that she had rehearsed over and over, instead of the apologies that Marcelino ought to have offered her, what occurred was the normal thing when a woman who has given herself for love confronts the rascal who has seduced her with cynical expertise. The recriminations become entangled and lose their force among tears and kisses. The seducer gains the upper hand, swears and promises yet again. The two young bodies attract each other with a secret, irresistible force, and the woman surrenders herself once more, this time experiencing even greater pleasure, the more lasting and intense precisely because it is increasingly alloyed with remorse.

Consequently, they resolved to continue their love, which is to say that they resolved nothing at all …

Santa returned by the route she had come. As she passed the gambling den a second time, a heavy-set, jewelry-encrusted older woman stepped away from a group of gentlemen with whom she had been conversing and spoke to Santa.

“Where are you going so fast, little one? Let me look at you … My, aren't you pretty!”

Against her will, the taste of the forbidden fruit still in her mouth, Santa stopped and let herself be examined. Vaguely, she heard herself being praised, being asked jokingly if she had quarreled with her boyfriend, and then being told, much more seriously and, as it turned out prophetically, that if her boyfriend were to break up with her, well, she could earn twenty pesos a day at an easy job in the city.

“Just ask for Elvira, la Gachupina they call me.” Plaza such and such, street number so and so. “You won't forget? I promise I'll make you a princess!”

Santa went home, where she arrived with a certain officious cheerfulness by which she hoped to allay the growing suspicions of her mother and of Fabián and Esteban, who were off working for three days because of the Fiesta de las Flores.

The end of the festival coincided with the full onset of Santa's misfortune. Marcelino was clearly getting away from her and, by the end of a month of desultory courtship showed himself clearly fed up, more likely to avoid than to seek any sort of encounter with her. And one fine day, early in the morning, Marcelino paraded down the wide road from San Angel at the head of his detachment, on the way to Mexico City and then, ultimately, to some other destination, without notifying Santa, who knew nothing of his redeployment. There were no trumpets or high-spirited horseplay that morning, as the horses filed past, their hooves sinking quietly into the loose sand of the wide road through the village. Were it not for the cries of a boy who saw the detachment passing through, Santa would have had no idea at all that Marcelino was leaving. She joined the boys who were running toward the shrilly shouted announcement: