“I brought it from the Café Cosmopolita,” announced the maid when she returned carrying a tray with coffee, sugar, and a piece of French bread split lengthwise and buttered. “It's the best, that's what the toreros who are always in there say, anyway. The butter is from Toluca and the bread is toasted. Do you want me to move a table over here? At the front desk they sent for a messenger, and I asked them to send up a pen. Do you want cold or hot water for the washstand?” She had finished serving the much-pondered breakfast and asked the last question as she lifted the pitcher that stood in the empty washbasin.

Santa paid little heed to the servant's chatter, nodding in absentminded assent to everything. After awaking to rude remembrance of the scene last night, she felt even worse at noticing that, no matter how hard she tried to concentrate on the loss of her sainted mother, whose virtues she dutifully enumerated, her thoughts tended to go sliding away in every direction, even toward quite trivial and totally unrelated matters. Didn't they slide off, in fact, as the servant chattered away, toward el Jarameño? And in Santa's efforts to counteract that slide, she had to go where it had gone and naturally ended up thinking much longer than she intended to about that irksome matador …

When her melancholy returned, she wrote a few lines to her colleague la Gaditana:

“… I'm in a very bad, sad way. See you this afternoon, let Pepa know or Elvira. Please send the messenger back with the darkest dress you can find in my room and let me borrow a black shawl …”

She sealed the letter, made a bundle of the clothes that she had been wearing the night before, and slipped between the sheets. Returning to her mental solitude, this time she easily guided her thoughts to the place where she wanted them to go, down the road to her village, Chimalistac, and the little white house of her childhood, her mother and brothers, her birds and flowers, her morning communions in the crumbling little chapel with its worm-eaten bell tower and its string of swallow nests like mossy clay pots under the eves. She directed her steps from her own house through the gardens of relatives and childhood friends. It all seemed so fantastic, as if it came not from her own experience but from someone else's. Oh, it was beautiful, alright, but Lord how far away … somewhere far beyond good and evil, far from purity or prostitution, far, far away. In some ways, the distance pleased her, because it meant that, if she could not go back, it was not necessarily because she was being punished by an invisible, almighty power … But what if she were being punished, and what if she begged forgiveness, prostrated herself before that invisible power?

“No, no, I couldn't go there,” she mumbled into her pillow, hiding her face, fairly certain that the invisible power was, indeed, watching.