Shut up in his study after having given a slam of the door in response to Julia’s curiosity, he paced back and forth, seized by a blind fury he didn’t know how to vent.

Who was so interested in hurting me? he wondered. Undoubtedly he had been the victim of an intrigue, the object of slander, caught in a trap. He examined his own conduct and found nothing reprehensible. On the contrary, during the months he served as a professor, he never strayed from the most scrupulous ethics. And now look how they repaid him! With a humiliation that was all the more offensive for being anonymous and collective.

He reviewed his memories. Among all the people he had frequented recently he couldn’t find a single friendly face, a single kindred spirit, a single cordial gesture. In light of what had just happened, he finally read the hostility of the stances, the hypocrisy of the words. Guided by his bitterness, he groped his way, exhuming almost forgotten phrases, nameless faces and unfinished episodes that now, at last, reached their outcome.

After that, Fernando withdrew from a society that had declared war on him to dedicate himself to the duties of his position, duties that were becoming increasingly intricate and daunting. He maintained no contact with anyone except for a few formal exchanges with Don Leonardo Cifuentes, who visited his house, and the obligatory communication with his assistant, Rubén Martínez.

Ulloa began to observe Rubén as if he—a Coleto—were a compendium of the characteristics of all Coletos. In Rubén, he sulked the mechanisms of the conduct of a town that had rejected him, and he found a mean slyness that offended him. How could this naive young man think to deceive him with his excessive adulations, his docility which was no more than a means of getting his own way? Because even events as apparently random as having ended up in San José Chiuptik one stormy night obeyed a preconceived plan of which Rubén was the agent.

The ranchers, Fernando said to himself, have placed someone near me to spy on my movements and intentions.

Despite this discovery, Fernando did not watch his back. He continued to depend on Rubén to organize his journeys through the interior, and Rubén continued to be the intermediary who set up his meetings with the owners of the tineas. Moreover, in the conversations their isolation brought them to, Fernando gave free rein to his words without stopping to think that the other was undoubtedly going to twist and misinterpret them, and, of course, pass them along.

Fernando would begin to hold forth at the slightest provocation. So Rubén, on occasion, would timidly allude to his poverty, the humbleness of his origins. He didn’t want sermons and wasn’t even asking for advice. He simply liked to complain about a situation that, ultimately, suited him.