“I bet they've told you horrors about us and our houses, right?”

Santa shrugged her shoulders and gestured vaguely with both extended arms. What did she know?

“I've come,” she added, “because there is no place for me at home anymore, because my mother and brothers have thrown me out. And because I don't have a skill, and above all … because I swore that this is what would happen to me, and they didn't believe it. I don't care if these houses and this life are the way people say or if they're worse … the sooner that it's done with, the better. Fortunately, I don't have anyone.”

She began to examine the colors of the rug, her nostrils flaring slightly, her eyes tearing.

Pepa, busy sponging cheeks and neck, assented without formulating a word. An experienced woman of the world, she easily recognized in the protesting girl, who was no doubt still reeling from her recent abandonment, yet another jilted victim of men's deceptions. It was the cruel, eternal story of the sexes, the coming together with a kiss, a caress, and a promise, only to separate soon enough, with ingratitude, disappointment, and tears! Pepa knew that story backwards and forwards. She had not always been like this—with a gesture toward her extinct charms, barely sufficient anymore to attract a beast like the one still lying in her bed, a total drunk, an ex-convict or escapee from God-knows-how-many prisons, who was finishing his miserable, shiftless life with the subsidy that Pepa earned, coin by coin, doing … all sorts of things.

“Want to have a drink with me?” she said, pulling a bottle of clear aguardiente out of her dresser. “Here, don't be silly. This is the only thing that keeps us going … No? Well, you'll get used to it.”

Pepa downed her brimful glass while standing quite close to Santa, who was watching her closely, and she continued her sudden burst of confidences, initiated to impress the neophyte, no doubt, but extended by her own need to give vent, from time to time, to what she had seen and suffered. By expressing these things, she expelled a bit of the stagnant, putrid water that drowned her own spirit, so to speak, and splashed it on other hearts and other women who did not give a damn about her, as she well knew.

“You wouldn't appreciate it yet, anyway,” Pepa went on, “sitting there with that expression of shock. You feel young and healthy, with a wounded heart that you can't accept, and you want to take it out on your body. Well, it won't be the last disappointment, hija, and our bodies eventually wear out and get sick. Eventually they won't want you, anymore, and you'll be like me, a sorry sight, look …”

And with a tragic attitude, she unabashedly lifted her nightgown to show Santa her sinewy, undefined calves and withered, deformed thighs, her hanging, discolored belly split from side to side by deep folds, like the furrows left by the repeated plowing of a field that had once produced harvest upon harvest to enrich the landowner, but now lay exhausted, its fertility gone, leaving only the perpetual, shameful trace of its long exploitation.