A Singer Supports the Sick Journalist Through Prostitution

The singer’s support of the sick reporter is the costly, concealed center of a late turn in Molina’s embedded film story. After professional ruin and prolonged drinking leave the reporter without work or money, she finances his care by selling sex while presenting the arrangement as singing work. He eventually discovers what she has done, but only after suspicion has already estranged them; the revelation makes her devotion visible without making it easy for either of them to speak openly about it.

From Public Rejection to Private Devotion

Before the reporter’s collapse, the singer is caught between him and a wealthy magnate. The reporter has destroyed an article, then regretted acting so impulsively. When he gives the singer banknotes as payment for the favor, she does not treat the money as a settlement that can resolve their relationship. Later, she and the magnate explain that the reporter would accept no payment, leaving her unsure how to put the affair right. The reporter, furious at seeing her with the magnate, says he wants them to forget him and leaves behind a paper bearing lyrics he has written for her. The singer’s tears disclose what she has been unable to admit: she is in love with the reporter.

Her subsequent performance gives that unspoken attachment a public form. At a nightclub, the room is still being prepared when she takes her place beside a Greek column. The piano begins, maracas join softly, and she reaches for a cigarette from the prompter before starting the song’s introduction. Her hands tremble and her eyes fill with tenderness as she sings while thinking of the reporter. The scene makes music a channel for feeling that ordinary exchanges have failed to settle; its public stage contrasts with the private, unresolved relationship behind the performance.

The Reporter’s Collapse

Meanwhile, the reporter’s prospects narrow. Blacklisted by the union, he can no longer work as a journalist, and he finds that other employers will not hire him without a recommendation. His appearance and weakened condition, consequences of his drinking, further obstruct him. He eventually takes laboring work at a sawmill, but lasts only a few days. His appetite has disappeared, food will not go down, and thirst is the only sensation he can identify. When he collapses during a lunch break, a fellow worker takes him to hospital.

Feverish and delirious, the reporter calls out the singer’s name. His fellow worker searches his papers for her address and calls her in Mexico City. She has left the luxurious apartment where she had been living and is now in a cheap boardinghouse, so its housekeeper passes on the news. The singer immediately wants to travel to Veracruz, but she has no money for the fare. The boardinghouse owner refuses to lend it without a personal concession from her. The account indicates that she accepts the arrangement, though it does not dwell on it; this becomes the first step in the financial sacrifice that will sustain the reporter.

Care and Concealment in Veracruz

At the hospital, a doctor and a nun assess the reporter and tell him that he is responding fairly well to treatment, but will need care, good food, and rest, and must stop drinking. He has no money and doubts how such advice can be followed. Then the singer appears at the far end of the ward. Her plain white dress, tied-back hair, and lack of jewelry sharply contrast with the luxury associated with her former life. The reporter reads this simplicity as evidence that she has broken away from the magnate’s world.

The singer tells him that he has somewhere to go: a small, modest house with a garden, outside the suburbs of Veracruz and near the sea. She has rented it for them. Weak from illness, the reporter says he would rather rest in a hammock than in the bed she prepares. Her practical care gives the hospital’s abstract instructions a place and a person through which they might be carried out. Yet she keeps her means of support secret. She does not let him accompany her to the luxurious hotel where she says she sings each night, or even walk her to the door.

Discovery and Misunderstanding

As the reporter improves, the secrecy unsettles him. He asks why the papers never advertise a star attraction like the singer. She says that keeping her name out of the advertisements helps prevent the magnate from pursuing her again, and that the magnate might send someone to kill the reporter if he were seen at the hotel. Instead of accepting this explanation, the reporter suspects that she has resumed seeing the magnate. His jealousy leads him first to the hotel, where she is absent from the billboards and unknown to those there, and then through the harbor districts in search of a cheap tavern.

There he sees her working as a prostitute beneath a streetlamp. The discovery changes the meaning of her absences: she has not been returning to the magnate, but earning the money that keeps the reporter housed and cared for. He hides rather than let her see him, then goes home devastated. When she returns toward morning, he pretends to be asleep. The next day he looks for work without telling her the reason and comes back unsuccessful, still pretending that matters are fine. When she prepares to leave again, he asks her to stay because he fears for her safety and fears not seeing her again. His appeal grows out of genuine attachment, but he makes it without revealing that he knows what she is doing or what it costs her.

The Magnate’s Return

The magnate has been searching for the singer after learning that she is living in poverty, and arrives at the small house by the sea first through his chauffeur and then in person. She initially refuses to speak with him. He asks forgiveness and explains his earlier actions as the result of love and desperation at losing her. Crying, she tells him what has happened. He concludes that her sacrifices show that she loves the reporter and will continue to do so. He gives her a case containing her jewels, kisses her forehead, and leaves.

This return does not undo the reporter’s illness or the singer’s deprivation. Instead, it supplies a late recognition of what her sacrifice means, from the man who had previously stood between the lovers. She begins searching frantically after the magnate departs, but the scene’s outcome is not supplied. Molina ends the episode with a brief expression of sadness, leaving the singer’s sacrifice acknowledged but its future unresolved. The melodramatic sequence turns a hidden economic reality into a revelation: the reporter’s misreading of her work and the magnate’s delayed understanding are answered not by a simple reconciliation, but by the visible cost of the care she has provided.