And off they go on the wide road to fashionable San Angel: to their right, the thick adobe wall of the Hacienda de Guadalupe, to their left, a string of country houses belonging to rich families from Mexico City—the Casa de Sanz, the old and aristocratic Casa de Cumplido, and many others. If they have time, they drive through the small squares of San Jacinto and Los Licenciados, stopping, on the way back, to enjoy the shade of the fresno and wax trees in the company of well-to-do families who are spending the summer in San Angel. Agustina and Santa sit on an iron bench, Coyote curled up at their feet and Esteban and Fabián apart, to one side, leaning on a tree trunk, all of them silent and filled with the inhibitions that humble people feel in the presence of the rich. If it is getting late, they go no further than the Plazuela del Carmen and listen to the music under the arches of the city hall, and they buy sweets that they are too embarrassed to eat in front of so many strangers. Normally, they stay until the departure of the seven o'clock train back to the capital, its cars brightly lit and full of shouting people who laugh and call to one another. The train pulls out with a thunderous sound, as if a glass building were crashing to earth, and it rolls away down the darkening track, leaving behind it snatches of song, an echo of children's wails and women's laughter, and thousands of sparks that whirl drunkenly in the air until finally disappearing in the fields on either side. Then Santa's family begins the trip home.

It is a moment for melancholy …

The countryside spreads out measurelessly, inundated by a sea of shadows. The contours of the things around us grow larger in our eyes and the quiet of our surroundings penetrates our spirit. Our immediate sorrows seem to diminish, while our hidden yearnings, our unconfessable, utterly unrealizable desires, rise up close at hand, with the face of imminent possibilities, mixed together in the shadows with all that has been but never more will be. An angelus played by the poor bells of the secularized Carmelite convent hangs so tenuously in the sky that its call to prayer lacks the power to interrupt the landscape's solemn preparations for sleep or our own mystic meditations.

It is a moment for melancholy …

Fleeing from the reality of their lives, Fabián and Esteban dream aloud about how they might take over the factory where they work, the factory that, like a gigantic vampire bat, dulls their senses as it sucks away their health and freedom. At that moment, the solution to the problem seems obvious and simple:

“Look,” they say, drawing grand forms in the dark air, “if we save such and such, and do so and so, why, at the end of one year we'll have …”