Dignity was something the Indians had relinquished long ago and. thought they had lost forever. But now, suddenly, they were finding it intact, with all its weight, its conflicts and its lacerations, and a mari in a position of authority was inciting them to recover it. Such urgency could only produce uneasiness in the old people, rejection in the cowards, and uncontrollable rage in those who were discontented—the young. All of them went to an extreme —in some, it was an extreme of servility, in others, an extreme of rebelliousness. The air was dense with uneasiness, restlessness. What events would the law give birth to?

Fernando Ulloa didn’t know; like his opponents, he was groping fearfully toward what was to come. Common sense inclined him to fall in with Leonardo’s arguments and acknowledge the judiciousness of his advice. But it wasn’t only his intelligence, his ideal of justice or his ambition to make Mexico a prosperous country, it was the deepest part of himself that swung around to reject such a transaction, to label an alliance with the ranchers impossible and monstrous.

Because Fernando Ulloa wasn’t merely a middle-aged employee with a salary that didn’t stretch to meet his needs and who had achieved less than he set out to. He was also the orphaned child of the campesino who defied his masters and followed Emiliano Zapata across the southern mountains that were ringing with shouts of freedom. He was the son of the helpless widow who was driven to the city by hunger. He was the boy who, during the years when other boys play, worked at menial, degrading tasks to earn a few centavos. He was the applicant for meagre scholarships. He was the boarding-school student who never had enough to eat, who never had any books except those his schoolmates loaned him. He was the hard-working student who earned the highest marks, one of the group chosen by the professors for a brief trip to Europe to give them further training and polish. Later, he was also the man who, without quite knowing how, became entangled with Julia, and in order to support her, abandoned his education and never received the degree for which he and his mother had made so many sacrifices.

If this postponement (he never resigned himself to calling it a definitive renunciation) had caused Fernando any pain, perhaps he had compensations of another order. But for his mother, eaten away by illness, the disappointment, the sudden loss of her reason for being, was annihilating. She died.