Loca tried to make friends with it. She imitated the peacock’s walk and tried to make peacock talk, but it didn’t go along with any of her playfulness, not because it was stupid like a chicken or ornery like a rooster either. The peacock, Loca concluded, was just not an imitator. Or maybe it was just too preoccupied with being on the run from its owner to let itself be amused by Loca.

The acequia was as far as Loca had ever drifted from home, and her place to play and hide since she had learned to walk. Consequently, she knew and loved everything about it. She knew its quiet nature in summer, its coolness in spring; and she didn’t mind it in winter when the muddy water was frozen most of the time. It was her own place to be—until the invasion of the peacock, which seemed to have the same sense of proprietorship toward the acequia as she.

Sometimes a vecino would catch sight of La Loca down there and think she was lost. Most people around mistook the fact that she showed no apparent social skills to mean she was a simpleton. None of them realized just how aware Loca was of her surroundings and of all the things that went on outside and away from Sofi’s house. And not only that, but how effective she could be in handling circumstances that were beyond most people’s patience, not to mention ability.

She had grown up in a world of women who went out into the bigger world and came back disappointed, disillusioned, devastated, and eventually not at all. She did not regret not being part of that society, never having found any use for it. At home she had everything she needed. Her mother’s care and love, her sisters, who, each in their own way, had shown their affection and concern for her, and she, in turn, for them. Even the man who came to stay—who her mom said was her dad who had left when she was a baby before she died, who really smelled of hell, entertained her with card games and cheap magician’s tricks that to Loca were nevertheless extraordinary—even he, in his own way, brought her contentment, and thus she fit him into her world.

Although she did not love her sister Caridad best, she loved her sweetest. Caridad, unlike don Domingo, who couldn’t hide it no matter how much aftershave he used, did not smell of hell no more. Instead, her hands and breath smelled now of laurel and sage. Her eyes and voice smelled very sad but always soothing, like a lullaby with no words. But Loca never said nothing about it to no one, how much she liked her sister’s presence more and more, because above all she knew that nothing that exquisite could last in the vulgarity of the big world very long.