“It’s true that no image of Our Lord is displayed there . . . but in any case, it’s a sigh of respect.”

The owner of a store selling “clothing and novelties,” communicated the total price for the purchase of a rubber poncho, riding pants, field boots and other implements that César would undoubtedly use to accompany Fernando on his circuits through the interior.

Accustomed to the brutal rejection of the people of Comitán, César didn’t notice the secret hostility that surrounded him here. On the surface nothing had changed: the same greetings, the same handshakes, the same polite questions about his own health and his family’s. The situation would have gone on like that indefinitely if the owner of the boarding house, tormented by her exacting conscience, hadn’t taken the drastic step of telling César, in the most honeyed words, that she was going to need his room “because an orphaned cousin was coming to live by her side.”

César was somewhat displeased by this request. Being a boarder in Señorita Morales’s house was to his liking; his room was spacious and airy, with furniture that was old but solid and handsome; the food was abundant and a good plate of stew or refried beans, his favorite, was never lacking. The care and laundering of his clothing left nothing to be desired. But César was confident that these advantages could also be enjoyed elsewhere, and Señorita Morales’s reason for asking him to leave seemed so valid that it never would have occurred to him to doubt it for a second. But when he had paraded from one boarding house to another without finding accommodations, he realized that his former landlady’s orphaned cousin was just as false a pretext as all the others by which he had been denied lodgings.

César told Fernando Ulloa about the predicament he was in, and Fernando, not wishing to allow his assistant to continue undergoing the humiliation of rejection, offered him a place in his own house.

He made the offer without consulting Julia. He didn’t consider it essential to do so, given that the house was too large for the childless couple and many of its rooms were closed up for lack of use. And servants were inexpensive and easy to find. Why would Julia become furious, as she did, when she learned that a stranger was going to live under her roof? Fernando didn’t want to plumb her underlying reasons; in the years of living with her, he had grown used to sudden explosions of rebelliousness or temper, fits of weeping, outbursts that quickly evaporated without a trace. He attributed them, out of good-natured laziness, to the instability of the female soul, the unpredictable physiological ups and downs, the oppression of the horizonless routine in which women are submerged.