“That's what her eyes are like?” Hipólito asked again, even more abstractedly than before. “If they're like that when they are just looking, Jenaro, what must they be like when they're full of love?”

“Jeez, patrón. Santa has the eyes of a doe, the size of almonds, and black, black, if you could only see them!”

“It would probably make me blind all over again,” declared Hipólito in a prophetic tone.

“You love her that much, patrón?” asked Jenaro, for the first time outright, although this street-smart waif who never had a childhood, this pavement-pounding kid without parents had long since clearly recognized the signs of the blind man's passion.

Hipólito's head hung forward onto his chest, and his only answer to the direct question of the boy was a shrug of his shoulders, because he could not begin to gauge the intensity of his love, as if a seaman shrugged when asked to number the waves or an astronomer the stars. And he opened his arms measurelessly.

At that moment, the French dry cleaner's steam whistle thrust its anguishing shrillness into the air in its straight, white column of steam, and the workers there and in the other shops tucked in their filthy blue shirts and began to pour on to the sidewalk, obstructing it while they shouted their vulgar goodbyes to each other or the partiers, with arms around each other's shoulders, heading up the street, no longer to the Corner of the Magi, which had closed an hour earlier, but to cheaper eating houses and watering holes. The prudent workers headed to their distant, humble homes. Both partiers and prudent workers moved slowly, though; they were tired, tired of the work of the day, of the week, of the year, tired of the years and tired of their lives.

Neither Jenaro nor Hipólito paid attention to the parade of exhausted workers or the general exodus of the afternoon, which itself seemed exhausted, pale, as if struggling to get away over the peaks on the city's western horizon. They had not even noticed when, at five o'clock sharp, the public school opened its doors and inundated the street with children.

“Tell me about her body, Jenaro,” murmured Hipólito after a prolonged lapse in their conversation, his chin still on his chest. “What's it like?”

Jenaro moved closer to Hipólito because a few couples of workers and maids—to judge by their clothes in the waning light—sat on the same bench, the men very close to the women, the men making all sorts of animated propositions and the women saying only “no, no” and keeping their suitors' hands under control with monosyllabic reprimands and occasional twists of the body. Jenaro lowered his voice, except that he had to raise it every two or three minutes when the streetcars passed, brightly lit and crowded, almost brushing the curb by the little garden where they sat.

“I've never seen her body to be able to describe it to you, patrón. But when she dresses up real fancy to go out, like to the theater or for dinner with those guys from the Club, I swear she gets taller, this much,” he touched the blind man with his hands to indicate about four inches, “and her waist gets smaller and her breasts go up … ah, and her hips get fuller somehow, but that's about it … her dress and wrap cover a lot. The time to see her is when she's staying in and wearing that nightgown in which everything underneath makes some kind of mark. Oh, and when she's sitting down, her feet look really little, about the size of mine,” he paused while taking a tactile measure of his feet, “and her leg, the one that she crosses, is real pretty, patrón, small at the bottom and big and round at the top. She always wears black stockings stretched real tight and shiny, without a wrinkle. But that's about it, that's all I've seen … But you want me to tell you what you notice most, and what her customers grab most when they sit her on their laps in the parlor? You won't get mad, patrón?”