Like so many other ambitious men, César wanted to erase his lowly origins with an excellent education. His case was already difficult in itself because it cost his mind (unschooled in scholarly discipline) too great an effort to grasp what he sought to imbue it with, and what he did take in he took in uncritically. And there was another obstacle: César had enrolled at the Instituto to solve a personal problem. But he found nothing in the classrooms but hollow words, abstract formulas that were in no way related to the experiences and urgent needs of his life.

The only one who was able to speak to César’s needs was Fernando. And then only in passing, since the subject he taught could not have been drier or more remote.

But the students were preoccupied by an enigma that had nothing to do with numbers: the engineer’s mission. For what purpose had he come to Ciudad Real? Were the rumors true, the ones that said he was going to strip the rich of their lands in order to redistribute them among the poor and the Indians?

There was a malevolence hidden in questions like that, a wounded susceptibility, a set of threatened prejudices Ulloa was unable to perceive. His answers gave an overall vision, a general theory in which the particular cases that were before him lost all importance, at least in his eyes.

According to Ulloa, Mexican history could be represented by the gradual expansion of a circle: that of the owners of wealth. From the conquistadors to the monks to the Spanish colonists to the criollos, those of Spanish blood born in America. . . . There was still a long way to go before that wealth would reach the humble masses of the population. Considerable interests were opposed to the unfolding of this process; thus, every new expansion of the circle had been achieved at the cost of drowning the country in rivers of blood, making it an easy prey to foreign plunderers, and throwing it into the most brutal chaos, which was fertile ground for false redeemers and corrupt caudillos.

Why not do as other countries did? In them, the historical process, which is delayed but does not stop, flowed through the channel of a legal standard. At a certain moment, Mexico replaced the improvised proclamations of soldiers with the painstaking work of experts.

The first attempts failed because the legislator worked in the solitude of his chambers. The legal structure, sprung like Minerva from the head of Jupiter without passing through the heat and muck of any maternal entrails, turned out to be inapplicable to our peculiar circumstances, though it had been calculated on the most perfect models in Europe and North America.