“You're not from Mexico City …”

“Yes, I am, that is, not from the capital itself, but from very nearby. I'm from Chimalistac … not far from San Angel,” she added by way of explanation. “You can go by train. Have you ever been?”

The woman knew of San Angel because of its annual fair, which she had on several occasions attended in the company of her employer, who was an avid player of monte, a card game much played at the fair. Captivated by Santa's face and simple candor, the woman moved forward, resting her elbow on the banister, feeling pity, almost, to see Santa arrive in the same hole where she herself earned a living, a hole that would devour that beauty, devour that young flesh still ignorant, no doubt, of all the horrors that awaited it there.

“Why are you starting this life?”

Santa did not answer, because at that very moment there came the loud sound of a glass door opening suddenly and a woman's voice with a strong Spanish accent:

“Eufrasia! Go ask for two large glasses of anisette and soda water from Paco's store. Say that they are for me.”

Santa's interlocutor shrugged in the manner of someone resigned to suffer an incurable illness. She let the “new girl” into a small waiting room, and without further ado, went to do the errand, though she did slam the street door to signal her displeasure at being sent without a coin in hand.

As if the order for the two drinks of anisette were a bell ringing, the entire house now began to rouse itself, a very little bit at a time, amid an odd mixture of songs, laughter, and shouted commands, the doors of glass cabinets opening and closing, water pouring into unseen basins, masculine-sounding guffaws coming from women's throats along with some brazen, hoarse obscenities that punctured the air unabashedly … Santa listened in confusion, and it was only confusion that kept her from following her impulse to escape and return, if not home—for that was now impossible—then anywhere else that people did not speak that way. But she did not dare even to move for fear that she might be noticed, that a creak of her chair might give her presence away to the men and women in the upstairs rooms, whom she imagined tangling naked with one another. She did not even notice the return of Eufrasia, who startled Santa when she approached and said:

“Do you want to go in to see doña Pepa? She's awake now.”

Still confused, she followed the servant upstairs, through two dark, foul-smelling hallways, then into a parlor with two makeshift beds—belonging to servants, perhaps—still spread out on the carpet, the atmosphere acrid with the smell of alcohol and tobacco. In one corner stood an upright piano, its keyboard looking, in the dim light, like a monstrous set of teeth. Down another corridor, Santa heard, somewhere nearby, the crackle of grease in a frying pan. They went down a staircase and emerged in a small interior courtyard at one corner of which was a door of frosted glass panes.