A small devil appeared behind the angel. He was lean and had a huge nose, a nose that could have inspired Molière to write a comedy or Cervantes to invent an epic tale.

“Alicia, we’re going home,” the little devil announced in a voice that seemed strangely familiar.

A spirit with jet-black hair stood next to him. His features were so perfect that Alicia felt like kissing his lips, running her fingers through that fairy-tale hair, and falling in love with him, even if only for a while, enough for her to think she was awake and had bumped into the happiness that some careless person had dropped along the way.

“May I caress you?” she asked him.

The dark prince, for surely he was at least a prince, looked at the little devil uncertainly.

The devil made a gesture to indicate he need pay no attention to her. “That’s my blood running through her veins: it’s made her forget her decorum momentarily and left her on the wrong side of immodesty. It’ll pass.”

At a sign from the prince, a whole gang of dwarfs materialized, except that they weren’t dwarfs and were all dressed in white. Between the four of them, they lifted her off the bed by tugging at the sheets, and placed her on a stretcher. The prince took her hand and squeezed it. He would make a wonderful father, thought Alicia. The way he squeezed her hand and his velvety touch very much confirmed it.

“Would you like to have a child?” she asked.

“I’ve got seventeen, my dear,” said the prince.

“Go to sleep, Alicia, you’re embarrassing me,” said the little devil.

But she didn’t sleep. Holding her beau’s hand and riding aboard the magic stretcher, she went on dreaming as she rode through endless corridors decorated with a crest of white lights. They sailed through elevators and rooms haunted with laments, until Alicia felt that the air was getting colder and the pale ceilings changed into a celestial vault of clouds, stained red by the touch of a cotton-wool sun. The little devil placed a blanket over Alicia, and, following instructions from the prince, the dwarfs lifted her into an incongruous-looking carriage—incongruous, considering this was a fairy tale, because it had no steeds to pull it, nor was it decorated with copper spirals but only a cryptic message on the side:

LA PONDEROSA

COLD MEATS

Wholesale

and Home Delivery

The prince was closing the carriage doors when Alicia heard voices, someone ordering them to stop and shouting threats at them. For a few minutes she was left alone while her champions confronted a posse of peasants, for the air was filled with the unmistakable echo of blows with fists and clubs. When the little devil returned to her side, his hair stood on end, his lip was split, and he wore a victorious smile. The vehicle set off with a rattling movement, and Alicia had the strange impression that she could smell cheap spicy sausage.