As for the issue of prostitution, the closest precedent is the protagonist of a short story published by the Colombian author in 1972. This is Eréndira, an innocent little girl who was prostituted by her grandmother. The relationship between the two is real, not only because she and Delgadina are the same age—fourteen—but also because in both cases their virginity is sold to an elderly man. Furthermore, both have the ability to continue living even in their sleep; that is, while they sleep, they are conscious of what is happening around them. At this point, a clarification should be made: the prostitutes referred to in the title are not sad in the sense of melancholy, but in the sense of misery. There is no nostalgia in these invented memoirs, only bitterness. The greatest tragedy does not strike them, but rather the elderly man, who for decades was their regular client: when he discovers, perhaps too late, that he is one step away from death without having experienced the miracle of sex out of love, their memory becomes bitter in his mind.