The moral conflict which, for Doña Serafina, had an outcome that was unorthodox but eminently practical (when her conscience reproached her for embezzling from the conjugal heritage she soothed it by recalling the adage, “Thief that robs from thief gets a hundred years’ relief”), was for Límbano a dead-end street. Adolescence doesn’t understand or make allowance for the rationalizations of adulthood, the subtle delusions, the specious reasonings by which virtue is feigned. As soon as he caught sight of a duty, the young man threw himself into fulfilling it, and no amount of reasoning could turn him away from his goal. He wept, he pleaded that the ill-gotten fortune be returned to its rightful owners. When neither his tears nor his pleas were successful he began making threats. The idea of a righteous poverty repelled him far less than that of an affluence with such sordid origins. His histrionics didn’t even succeed in infuriating Don Timoteo, who heard him with the tolerant composure of a Great Dane listening to the yipping of a Chihuahua.

Desperate at being no more than a boy in the eyes of the adults when he had already taken upon himself the responsibilities of a man, nostalgic for his lost childhood and the warm darkness of the maternal breast, Límbano assumed the fetal position of a corpse; he curled up in the grave’s lap. He killed himself with a shot in the head before he reached his sixteenth birthday.

The tragedy, everyone said, repeating the term with which the local newspaper had referred to the event, plunged the Santiago home into mourning. Their dead son’s grave became an abyss the couple could not cross. Don Timoteo found refuge only in his absorption in money, and he hoarded and tallied up his holdings in solitude. Doña Serafina persisted in her devotions, her prayers for souls in Purgatory, in the hope that Límbano was among their number. Because according to the priest he could have had, at the moment of his passing, the perfect repentance that would save him.

Pair of doddering old fools, César, now the sole heir, grumbled to himself. If I, their son, their flesh and blood, see them in a bad light, how much worse will they look to people who aren’t even related to them and don’t know how to share their neighbor’s pain.

Sympathy, what might be called sympathy for the Santiago family’s misfortune, was demonstrated by very few people in Comitán. And when the first rush of horror had passed, when the noise of the shot had died down, the onlookers began to ponder the event, now in full possession of their faculties. Their reflection led them to this verdict: the Santiagos had received the punishment they deserved. And under the shelter of this extenuating certainty, the event and its consequences could be spoken of lightly, with disdain or even mockery.