Fernando Ulloa’s arrival in Ciudad Real alarmed the owners of the vast fincas, who dusted off documents, consulted their cunning lawyers and held long, mysterious meetings.

How to make Ulloa forget his duty? How to transform him into an ally, a servant of the landowners’ interests? Opinion was unanimous: by bribery. Fernando Ulloa had no asset but his profession, no income but his salary. His shameful poverty, concealed by a thousand ingenious tricks, suddenly showed through in the threadbare elbow of a shirt, the indiscreet shine at the knees of his trousers. To round out his budget, hadn’t he agreed to teach a course in mathematics at Ciudad Real’s Instituto Superior?

It was true that Fernando Ulloa had no children. But his wife did not appear to be one of those self-abnegating, long-suffering women. She had to be an expensive wife.

She had to be because Julia Acevedo was beautiful, though not in the same way as Coleta ladies, who were very vain about the whiteness of their skin, sign of a noble ancestry, and the abundance of their flesh, evidence of a financial well-being that enabled them to lead a life in which gluttony and idleness remained the supreme luxuries.

No, Julia Acevedo was different. Tall, slender, agile. A female silhouette walking alone through the streets; a voice, a laugh, a sonorous presence rising above the whispers; an insolently red mane of hair, often left unbound in the wind. Nothing more was necessary to make the devout women, pale from years of enclosure, cross themselves behind their windows; to make the men dream and chomp at the bit of their respectability; to make the old people offer words of advice and predict catastrophes.

Oblivious to this image of herself, which she would not have recognized, Julia was bored. Housework had never interested her and the satisfactions of her life with Fernando were so precarious that Julia sought distractions beyond herself and her home, a clamor that would make her giddy and keep her from thinking about her problems and disappointments.

After being abandoned by her husband (a neglectful and uncouth Spaniard, or Gachupín as Mexicans call them), Julia Acevedo’s mother had attempted to replace the paternal authority with her own hardheadedness and lack of tenderness. She was obsessed by the idea of preserving her daughters (there were three of them, to top off her misfortunes) from the failure she had endured; she wanted to make them into women who could earn a living by working, who could dispense with a husband’s support. That only became possible, in her opinion, by learning a lucrative profession.

Without considering the girls’ individual aptitudes, Julia’s mother enrolled them in the Instituto Politécnico, since the scarcity of their means barred them from the private schools or universities. Julia’s sisters, more docile or perhaps more clear-sighted, satisfactorily completed their pharmaceutical studies and both now held positions that were modest but had good prospects for the future.