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who disobey their parents and masters and<br />
leave the house. They end up<br />
in the filthy gutter of a fast life.<br />
Nervous, she twisted her rebozo around and<br />
around, trying to squeeze<br />
out the best of her lies for this situation. It<br />
never failed.<br />
When the rebozo was turned a hundred<br />
times, a tale that fit the<br />
occasion always came to her. For her, lying<br />
was a survival skill that<br />
she had picked up as soon as she had<br />
arrived at the ranch. It was<br />
better to say that Father Ignacio had sent her<br />
to collect alms than to<br />
confess she had spilled the milk by chatting<br />
in the market. The<br />
judgment earned by the two stories was<br />
completely different.<br />
Anything could be true or false, depending<br />
on whether one believed<br />
it.<br />
For example, nothing she had imagined<br />
about Tita's fate had proved to<br />
be true.<br />
All these months she had been tormented<br />
thinking of the horrible things<br />
happening to Tita away from her kitchen.<br />
Surrounded by lunatics<br />
screaming obscenities, confined in a<br />
straitjacket, eating God knows<br />
what awful food away from home. She<br />
imagined that the food in a<br />
lunatic asylum, a gringo one to boot, must be<br />
the most disgusting in<br />
the world. Whereas in fact she'd found Tita<br />
looking pretty good, she'd<br />
never set foot in a nuthouse, she'd clearly<br />
been treated well in the<br />
doctor's house, and she hadn't been fed too<br />
poorly, since she looked to<br />
have put on a few pounds there. Still, no<br />
matter how much she had<br />
eaten, no one had given her anything like the<br />
beef-tail soup.<br />
That's one thing you can be sure of, or else<br />
why would she have cried<br />
so hard when she ate it?<br />
Poor thing, surely now that she had left, Tita<br />
would resume weeping,<br />
tortured by memories, the thought that she<br />
would never again cook<br />
alongside Chencha. Yes, surely she was<br />
suffering deeply.<br />
Chencha could never have pictured Tita as<br />
she was then, radiant in a<br />
shiny moire-inlaid satin dress, dining by<br />
moonlight and listening to a<br />
declaration of love. That would have been<br />
too much even for Chencha's<br />
feverish imagination. Tita was sitting by a<br />
fire roasting a<br />
marshmallow. Beside her John Brown was<br />
proposing marriage. Tita had<br />
agreed to accompany John under a half<br />
moon to a neighbor's ranch to<br />
celebrate the neighbor's discharge from<br />
military service. John had<br />
given her a beautiful dress he had bought for<br />
her in San Antonio,<br />
Texas, some time ago. Its multicolored<br />
fabric reminded her of the<br />
doves' plumage, the feathers around their<br />
necks, but without any sad<br />
associations with the distant day when she<br />
had shut herself in the<br />
dovecote. In fact, she felt completely<br />
recovered, ready to start a new<br />
life at John's side. They sealed their<br />
engagement with a gentle kiss<br />
on the lips. Tita didn't feel the same as when<br />
Pedro had kissed her,<br />
but she hoped that her spirit, which had been<br />
dampened for so long,
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