Love. Oscar knew he should have checked out right then. He liked to kid himself that it was only cold anthropological interest that kept him around to see how it could all end, but the truth was he couldn't extricate himself. He was totally and irrevocably in love with Ana. What he used to feel for those girls he'd never really known was nothing compared to the amor [love] he was carrying around for Ana. It had the density of a dwarf-motherfucking-star and at times he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad. (1.1.6.31)

She wasn't the only girl dreaming like this. This jiringonza was in the air, it was the dreamshit that they fed girls day and night. It's surprising Beli could think of anything else, what with that heavy rotation of boleros, canciones, and versos spinning in her head, with the Listín Diario's society pages spread before her. Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children, and fortune believes in God. Belicia was, if it was possible, even more susceptible to the Casanova wave than many of her peers. Our girl was straight boycrazy. (1.1.3.14)

Beli in love! Round Two! But unlike what happened with Pujols, this was the real deal: pure uncut unadulterated love, the Holy Grail that would so bedevil her children throughout their lives. Consider that Beli had longed, hungered, for chance to be in love and to be loved back (not very long in real time but a forever in the chronometer of her adolescence). [...]. With The Gangster our girl finally got her chance. (1.1.9.17)