“Nothing, at school I learned to read, but not books. I learned to read with my fingers … running them over raised letters. I learned to play the piano, and I learned to suffer, because I never really suffered before, even from my blindness. Being with my mother, her voice, her touch, was my universe. True, I couldn't see, but she saw for me, even better! In her way, she explained things to me, animals and people. She talked to me about colors, described flowers, the countryside, even the clouds! And better than the clouds, the sun itself! Because of her I know that the sky is blue and the countryside is green, and even though I don't know what blue and green are, here in my head I make up my own colors, and it could be better than reality … because when I imagine colors, I bring back my mother, who was, and still is for me, prettier, so much prettier than all the sky and countryside in the whole world. Even though my mother hardly visited me. During the first four or five weeks of my captivity, there she was, even early, every Thursday and Sunday, full of sweets, and tears, and affection all for me. I'd tell her, once we'd finished crying, about my progress in reading, music, and lace making. She would listen to me, hugging me to her bosom, and it was oh so hard to tear myself away when the bell rang to end visiting hours … Then she missed a Sunday, a Thursday, and another Sunday. How anxiously I awaited her, Santa, sitting in a corner of a courtyard, the one with the fewest people, where I wouldn't suffer more from overhearing the laughter and conversations of my schoolmates' families. Silly me. When I cried, I even tried to save my tears in my handkerchief to show her, when she returned, how I idolized her. But guess what! They evaporated! All tears evaporate. Ask anyone who knows about them … What I know is that the pain finally evaporates, too.”

The coda of the waltz extended itself softly and rhythmically across the keyboard, the girls sipped their rum punch, and Pepa, “the manager,” counted a pile of banknotes in her lap. With one finger, Santa was drawing odd shapes in the fine dust on the piano lid.

“Then,” Hipólito forged ahead, “until I was fourteen years old my life was colorless … dark, as sighted folk say. My four senses became well educated, the sense of touch, particularly. But my heart became callous, used to beating without caring. Why should I care about anybody if nobody cared about me? In my memory, my mother. In my hand, a cane that guided me and defended me and that I came to consider my only friend. Behind, total blackness. Ahead, total blackness. Invalid, miserable, poor, without hope, without affection. I was condemned to life imprisonment in public institutions, or to starvation if I tried make it on my own … unless some charitable soul took me out of the school with the idea of applying my skill at music or the manual arts. And that's what happened. A man named Primitivo Aldábez who owned the neighborhood upholstery shop, pitying my blindness and impressed by my manual dexterity, fulfilled the legal requirements and took me out of the school after getting my consent, which I didn't hesitate to give, anxious for a new direction …”