In response, the supposed savages and jerks laughed louder than ever as they went to their rooms. The curate settled into one of the less worn-out corners of the sofa to sit and doze while he waited for the evening card game with his regular adversaries: Mateo Izquierdo, the pawn broker; Anselmo Abascal, an employee of the Covadonga clothing store on Espíritu Santo Street; and Feliciano Sordo, who always talked about “losing his money, his youth, and his best energies” in the mines of San Luis Potosí, but who nonetheless paid his rent with extreme punctuality, carried a gold watch, always had cash on hand, and was the only one among the boarders who drank an expensive beer like Carta Blanca of Monterrey. It was whispered that the cash on hand, the gold watch, and the Carta Blanca all derived from the generosity of doña Nicasia, with whom Sordo had an understanding—it was also whispered—so that the two slept quite comfortably together every night just as if they were legally married. In public, however, both of them kept up appearances. She addressed him in the same tone she used for everyone else, without noticeable familiarity or any noticeable preference when serving food at table. The Spaniard called her tú with characteristically Spanish familiarity, but not greater than the familiarity that he applied to his fellow boarders, excepting the curate and el Jarameño. The one detail that more or less gave away their secret was the location of their bedrooms, contiguous one to the other, with a connecting door. The furniture that blocked the door on each side offered an exceedingly weak barrier: on doña Nicasia's side, a light sofa, and on Sordo's side, a small writing table, its ink pot completely dried out and its pens rusted and useless. It had been a long time since Sordo had written any letters to his problematical business contacts in San Luis Potosí.

Doña Nicasia's story, which she told now and then for the benefit of her boarders, inspired their respect and sympathy. She was the proud widow of a Spanish military man who had been killed in 1881 fighting against Cuban rebels, and she pronounced her married surnames, Aspeitia de Flores, slowly, with emphasis, to invoke the full luster of the Aspeitia family of Calatayud—her own clan—and of the possibly better-known Flores family of Segovia, her husband's. She assured them that she had distinguished, even noble, relatives on her mothers side, who had objected to her marriage with Flores, a mere lieutenant. But she had insisted, oh yes, being madly in love, and had said goodbye to everything and come with him to América. América, this heartless place that holds so many painful surprises for the decent people of Spain who incautiously take up residence here! Cuba, and everything about it, she knew by heart, especially Havana, which she described mixing its horrors and marvels indiscriminately: How money had rained from the sky at the time when she and her husband had first arrived, how hard times had ruined trade until little was left of the festive commercial city and until the entire island, once so prodigiously rich and so prodigiously indolent, had become a shadow of its former glory. By her account, the godless, unruly, and above all extremely ungrateful Cuban independence fighters had ruined the island's tobacco and sugar plantations, depriving it of fruit and flowers, impoverishing it, and decimating its rural population, burning and denuding its tropical countryside, leaving its ports depressed and its cities silent. The Cuban earth, insatiably thirsty, had been soaked in the blood of the damnable black insurgents and the noble Spaniards who had traveled there to give the place a brighter, more splendid future.