He—who was to become the lifelong source for both her heart’s misery and joy—was standing with some other young men looking as wily, as tirili, as he, right near the door of the church hall when Sofi and her family came in. Although he denied it thereafter, Sofi was never convinced that the purpose of their being at the entrance was not to get the first chance at the girls as they came in, since that is exactly what Domingo tried to do when he saw Sofi. Without even bothering to get permission from her father, that brazen young man with a charlatan’s black mustache and spit-shined boots came right up to her and tried to take her out to dance.

“¡Orale, tu!” Sofi’s father said, putting a hand firmly on Domingo’s arm just as that tirili was about to pull Sofi away from her family without a word. Sofi, in the meantime, was transfixed by the handsome stranger’s even white teeth, with just a slight gap that added to his charm in a sneaky kind of way and which he showed off with a wide grin, and above all, by those dark, sinful eyes. Even the Frank Sinatra records her future brother-in-law played for them when the chaperons were not in ear’s reach did not conjure up a more seductive image of a crooner. Her parents would not let her go to the movie house in Albuquerque, not even with Chencha, her sister and her comprometido—so convinced were they that la little Sofi would see something inappropriate for the child, such as they still considered her to be—so she did not have the slightest idea what Frank Sinatra looked like.

Meanwhile, Domingo, who Sofi knew at a glance was no less a dreamboat devil than el “Franky,” backed off at the father’s insistence, all too familiar with the restrictions of such fathers who protected their daughters’ virtue with unflinching vigilance, and with a subtle glance of regret at Sofi that said “too bad for us” he went off. Then, to Sofi’s further dismay, a minute later she saw him going round and round in a tight two-step embrace with another girl.

Her eyes stuck like chewing gum on that forbidden heartbreaker while the rest of her was made to sit between parents and grandparents the whole evening. She swore she saw him making goo-goo eyes at that mocosa as they waltzed, polkaed, and two-stepped one number after the next right in front of her. She never forgave Domingo for that demonstration neither, although he swore that he only danced with that girl because Sofi’s father had not let him have his first choice!