Inside the house, only four rooms:

First, the living room, which is also the dining room, judging by the square table in the center of it and the massive water jug along the wall under shelves crowded with plates and dishes, cups, and glasses of the most ordinary sort of materials. Along the other walls, wicker chairs. In a corner, a somewhat worm-eaten triangular piece of mahogany furniture that displays—along with a conch shell, a ceramic piggy bank (though shaped like an apple), and a pair of vases with silk flowers—the family's most treasured possession: a sculpture of middling quality representing the Santo Niño dressed in sequins and fringed silk, his right hand raised in blessing, seated on something one cannot quite see, and imprisoned in a large niche of leaded glass. On the floor, straw mats of various sizes; and hanging from a large nail beside the window, a guitar whose lack of dust and full set of strings testify to regular use.

Next, the bedroom of mother and daughter, who sleep in the same bed, a bed without springs or headboard, but spacious and spotless and defended by three things on the wall above it: a monochrome lithograph of the Virgin of Soledad fixed with four tacks; a colored one of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a frame that was once gilded; and a yellowed palm leaf that is replaced every Palm Sunday, whose Christian virtue protects the humble home from lightning strikes. During the day, the bed is the domain of a cat that passes the hours there, curled up in a ball.

Then, the bedroom of the two grown brothers—the bread-winners of the family, Esteban and Fabián—with two ordinary cots, a seed bin, two large trunks covered with half-cured cowhide, a piece of furniture always hung with recently and not-so-recently worn clothes, and on the walls, an infinite number of small, colored images arranged with certain care, celebrity portraits including dancers, circus performers, and professional beauties, that come in packages of La Mascota Cigarettes. Leaning in a corner, the shotgun, with powder horn and a bag of shot small enough to use for hunting in the woods and large enough to defend the house with or to patrol the village on the nights when the brothers were assigned to do so with other young men of the village.

At the end of the house, the kitchen, with its interior cooking area and small brassier closer to the door, between two rough stone metates on which mother and daughter grind corn to make tortillas.

Everywhere there is pure air, the perfume of the roses that peep over the walls, the sound of wind rustling leaves in the trees and water spilling softly over the village's two mill dams. During the day, the hum of insects in the sun; during the night, fireflies lit up by love, pursuing each other until, meeting, they go dark. Behind the house, myriad maguey plants, with their unvarying shade of green; on both sides, gardens and orchards; across the way, the property of their parish priest, Padre Guerra; and a few paces away, the chapel, tiny and poor, but furnished with saints who comfort the farmers in their grief and, occasionally, grant their wishes. A bit further on, the cemetery, open and silent, without marble statuary or poetic inscriptions, but offering a comfortable, protected spot for eternal slumber with its carnations and heliotropes that greedily cover the gravestones, the names of the disappeared, and the dates of their disappearances. And there is the bank of the small river, flanking the village square, shaded by ancient ash trees, the bridge hewn from a single enormous trunk, the three wash stands of crude tile where village women do laundry, and starting at the edge of the two mill ponds and their big dam, the road paved with fat, deeply seated stones leads to the lava flow called the Pedregal.