They finally made it to a private dining room of the Café de Paris, where, as practiced libertines who understood the special properties of shellfish, they ordered a seafood dinner for everyone, and the girls, being who they were, believed that they had to find the food delicious, even though they had little experience with crabs, shrimp and other such creatures, so difficult to eat and so unpleasant to the unsophisticated taste buds of ordinary—and beneath it all, still quite uncouth—young women such as they. El Jarameño ordered pork ribs and a salad, apart.

“For me, some of them nice ribs,” he said to the waiter, and turning to his friends, he added:

“Don't you laugh, see, because whenever I eat one of those things,” he pointed to a gorgeous lobster whose long antennae extended out of the serving platter, “I get the idea that it's still alive inside me, pinching my guts with those claws.” He looked a second time. “What an ugly bug … yuck!”

The murmur of the street was growing as, little by little, people filled the wide Plaza de Armas. Carriages passed more frequently now beneath the restaurant's dining-room balcony, onto which the members of Santa's party occasionally stepped to look in the direction of the plaza, which truly blazed with light.

Next, they heard the sound of fireworks, followed by a tremendous “aahhh” from the multitude, and the monster-concert began in the plaza. At the table in the Café de Paris, they served the food and uncorked the Pommery champagne, which inspired them to go so far as to speak of the Patria, without any of them being too sure of the true meaning of that abstraction. But it seemed disrespectful to have such a conversation in such a vulgar locale, with its stained carpet and vulgar, cushion-studded sofa, its electric light sprouting from a defunct gas fixture, its swaying bell cord with which to call the waiter, and its mirror scratched with a tangle of initials and dates, left there in unfortunate perpetual commemoration of alcoholic enthusiasms and love affairs unconfessable in any more transparent medium. And the behavior of the waiters, who never entered without knocking and never exited without carefully shutting the door behind them, seemed to make idealistic talk of the Patria even more hypocritical.

The revelers could not agree on a definition of the concept, hashing over formulas learned at school and various false notions heard or read somewhere or other. There were, of course, romantic toasts of a patriotic character over dessert: Everything for the Patria! And there were toasts from skeptics, too, strong-minded individuals in elegant tailcoats, who believed that in this modern age, New York City, with its elevated train, and Mexico City, particularly its central business district, why, they're basically all the same thing.

“What's your opinion, Jarameño? Is your Patria simply Spain, or is it the entire world?”

The women sat gravely, getting bored. Intermittently, random bits of music from the nearby Plaza de Armas floated in the balcony doors as did the awesome, breathing roar of the audience.