The voice brought them to a halt. Padre Manuel heard it from the ground where he was lying. Now the voice spoke to him.

“Get up, priest.”

It was not a request. It was a scornful command.

Painfully, Padre Manuel rose to his feet. He tried to stand erect, with a serene bearing and gaze. But his face was still convulsed with anger.

“Who are you?” he finally managed to ask the man who had spoken. At the same time he made an effort to fix the features in his memory, features chiseled as if by fire or by the blows of an ax in a simple, tough material.

“I am Pedro González Winiktón, the former judge.”

The voice corresponded to the face. Firm, decided, manly. And he had spoken in correct and fluent Spanish, without the flutelike intonation, the “sing-song” Ladinos loved to make fun of.

Padre Manuel and Winiktón remained face to face for a moment, examining each other as if each wanted to decipher in the other’s expression whether they would be allies or enemies. Two equal forces were recognizing each other.

All at once Father Manuel broke the spell. He turned on his heel and left.

XI

CHAPTER XI

WHEN A SMALL TOWN (and Ciudad Real was a small town, despite its name, its pretensions and its history) sees a stranger arriving, a shiver of misgiving, curiosity and expectation runs through its inhabitants.

But who comes to Ciudad Real, a place so remote, so far off of all beaten tracks? Travelling salesmen come, more out of habit than for the amount of business they can do here. They arrive with their bulging briefcases, their air of efficiency, their needless haste, their false assurances. The visit makes a little stir in the ooze of commerce. When the day is over, the travelling salesman raises a racket in the cantinas, provokes disputes with the men, flusters the girls. When he departs, he leaves behind him an unsettled debt, an insult left hanging, a precarious virginity. Or he carries off, clinging to him like a bramble, a desperate spinster for whom the adventure comes to its end in the next town.

Government employees also come to set up house in the town for a while. Their prestige is ambiguous, their rank difficult to determine with any precision. The honorableness of their origins is doubted; their situation as salaried employees is looked down on. But still their habits are imitated, their ideas are feared, their peculiarities are admired.

Fernando Ulloa was a government employee. His mission was to map out the region of Chamula and distribute plots of communally owned land called ejidos to the indigenous communities; in other words, he was to establish on the large landed estates the regime of small properties that was required by the law.