Santa, her eyes bright with her own tears, blew her nose loudly and uttered not a word.

The second part of the waltz, much faster and more cheerful than the first part, was now escaping from the piano player's tobacco-yellowed fingers, which pursued it artfully all over the keyboard.

“One day,” he continued, “my mother kissed me a lot, much more than usual. She changed my clothes, and picked me up to go out, but she started sobbing so hard that I got scared and, hiding my face in her shoulder, threw my arms around her neck and whispered in her ear, asking where she was taking me …

“‘I'm going to take you to a school, where you can learn things, and where …’ and she couldn't go on, and she hugged me harder than I was hugging her, and she sobbed openly and her tears drenched my face. And Santa, if you could see what I felt, as if something were breaking inside, an unknown sensation of pain and fear …

‘You mean I'm not going to live with you?’ I couldn't believe it.

‘No, but I'll come to visit you twice a week, and I'll bring you toys and money to buy candy.’

‘Then you don't love me anymore. Without your hands, how can I move around or eat? My hands are no good!’ And I cried, too, since I didn't have eyes to see her, I smelled her, I sniffed her like a little dog, and she begged me to stop crying …

‘Hush, for God's sake, my baby, people will hear you …’ and I swear that she was crying more than me, and we walked and walked until we got to the School for the Blind … and mother sprinkled these blind eyes with kisses and leaned against the wall.

‘If you only knew why I'm bringing you,’ she said, ‘if you only knew, you'd forgive me …’”

Santa was trembling. One of the girls had the servant bring some hot rum punch, good and strong. The third part of the waltz—slow, languid, melancholic—drifted through the rooms of the brothel.

“And then?” inquired Santa, gazing as if in a daze beneath the open piano lid at how the hammers hit the metal strings.