Santa has told every bit of hers, at this point, and she is stubbornly insisting that Hipo tell his. But he is resisting:

“No, it's not that I don't want to, but because it'll make you sad, and me too, in the bargain …”

“Fine, don't tell me anything” said Santa, acting angry, “but tomorrow don't expect me to talk to you at all.”

“Don't be mad, Santa … Okay, but come closer because I don't want anyone else to hear …”

After sitting silently and smoking nervously for a moment, he began:

“Imagine, Santa. I've seen neither light, nor father, nor mother.” And he paused for a long time, his brow knit, puffing on his cigarette so hard that it singed his moustache.

“Neither father nor mother? Why?” asked Santa, disturbed.

“My father never concerned himself with my existence at all, I suspect. And I never saw my mother because of this damned blindness, but even if I had seen her, I guess I would have forgotten her by now. I lost her when I was a child and she had to leave me, God knows why, at the School for the Blind.”

“Your mother abandoned you when you were little and already blind?”

“Oh, but I forgave her … when I took my first and only communion.”

There was another long pause in the quiet conversation. Santa went to the window and pushed aside the curtains. Hipólito shut his whitish eyes.

“Hipo, you old son of bitch, play something. This ain't a wake, is it?” complained the girl they called la Gaditana, in a bad mood because she kept losing at solitaire. The piano player automatically began the introduction to a waltz.

“How old were you when you lost her? Do you remember?” asked Santa, over his shoulder.

“Six or seven at the most. I still cried a lot then, about anything …”

The first part of the waltz flowed out of the blind man's hands, into the air, slowly and voluptuously.

“Where did this happen, Hipo?”

“You'll see. Because I was already blind when I was little, I never left my mother's side, not even to go play. She would sit me on her lap to feed me, spoonful by spoonful, and before she gave me each one, she told me what I was going to eat … and I was so clumsy, because I was so little and couldn't see, that I often spilled the soup or got my directions confused and took a bite of air … and she … I guess, she cried … but so quietly that I didn't hear her, and so I would ask her what those warm drops were on my cheeks. She took a long time to answer, and the drops increased, getting my cheeks all wet, and it made me so sad, Santita, that I would stop eating and—I still remember it perfectly—I'd ask her a lot of childish questions, wanting to know more about her than I could know from her voice and her tears: ‘Tell me, mamá,’ I'd say, ‘what you look like and what I look like.’”