With a quick puff, the priest blew out the lamp. He knelt in the dark for his nightly prayers. The persistent murmuring of the brook had become so habitual that he would have noticed it only if it had stopped for a moment.

And suddenly a deafening noise, a torrent of music inundated and shook the atmosphere, A barbaric music, a childish tune repeated to the point of exasperation, weirdly swollen by the organ’s enormous, hollow sonority.

After an instant of stupefaction, Padre Manuel stood up. He groped for something to make a light with and when he found nothing he opened the window impatiently. The wind and rain hurled themselves in at him like an ambush of wild beasts. With difficulty, he could see the church in the distance, dimly lit up. He headed there at a run.

The portal yielded to his push. Inside the nave the Indians had congregated. Not simply on their knees, but flat out on the ground, they protected the dying flames of votive candles with the hollow of their hands and moaned, writhing. Others were upright, lurching, already cockeyed from drinking, facing the altars in boorish complaint over wrongs done to them. The crest of the great wave of music, the childish tune, was continually breaking after sustaining its nothingness for an instant in space. And then it began again.

Padre Manuel did not even try to scream out a demand that all of this cease immediately. His voice would be lost in the more powerful current of sound. With rapid footsteps he went up the stairs to the choir loft. There, surrounded by religious and civil officials, was Xaw Ramírez Paciencia, also drunk, playing a Chamula tune on the organ.

“You!” Padre Manuel exclaimed.

In that one syllable were compressed his surprise, his discouragement at the failure of his lessons, his disappointment at seeing himself uncomprehended and betrayed by the only man he had any reason to trust, and his indignation at the sacrilege that was being committed.

“Tell them all to leave this place! The House of the Lord deserves to be respected.”

Xaw stared at Padre Manuel stupidly. Perhaps he did not understand what he was being ordered to do. His fingers continued to press down on the same keys again and again and again, without a pause, with a mechanical inevitability.

Padre Manuel’s moment of defiance resounded against the walls of the church and gradually died out. Those who were still lucid enough to realize that something out of the ordinary was happening peered up with alert faces. The officials who surrounded Xaw gripped their staffs of leadership threateningly.

The priest did not see that threat when he flung himself at the sacristan. He lashed out, blind with rage at himself or at Xaw, he didn’t know. With a shout the officials advanced on him.

“Be still!”