The speaker of “Tin Tan Tan” is a young man, a poet (he will appear as a central character in “Bien Pretty”) who is addressing his lost love in very flowery, melodramatic language. His poem, written in short paragraphs in the form of an acrostic (each paragraph begins with a letter of the woman’s name), makes it quite clear that he is heartbroken and will probably die if she isn’t moved to take him back.
The other side of this love affair is described in “Bien Pretty,” whose narrator, Lupe, is the woman addressed in the preceding poem. Lupe, a painter, moved from San Francisco to San Antonio and is house-sitting for a fashionable artist; she hired an exterminator to get rid of the cockroaches and then hired him to pose for her, and they fell in love. In the midst of a passionate affair, he told her he had to return to Mexico to take care of something involving his children, and she eventually heard that he has two wives in two different Mexican cities. Now she really misses him but is trying to convince herself that she doesn’t need him in order to be happy.
