“They’re suspicious; that’s natural. After all, they don’t know us; we’re Ladinos and they don’t have a very high opinion of Ladinos. It’s up to us to convince them that our intention is not to harm them but to see to it that the law that protects them is carried out.”

“The old men are very reluctant. We can’t count on them.”

But César wasn’t too sure about the young men either. Who knows what they’re thinking, who knows how they interpret what we say to them? The brightest of them was undoubtedly Pedro González Winiktón, who had offered to serve as their interpreter and guide.

The long excursions began right away; the Caxláns, Fernando and César, went on horseback, and Winiktón went on foot along with a little boy he treated as his son, Domingo Díaz Puiljá.

Familiar with the trail and light on their feet, the Indians would go ahead. Pedro would stop in front of a boundary stone, and Fernando would note down a few figures and take measurements with some strange devices that were carried by a pack mule. From time to time he would shake his head in impatience or doubt.

The engineer had learned to drink posol. At the edge of a stream or a spring, he would dismount to beat the corn paste up with water. He would chat with his assistant or ask Pedro who owned the sheep grazing nearby, who had planted that cornfield, what Don Olinto Serrano—who rented out that land as if it belonged to him—was like.

Pedro, precise and eager to help, answered as fully as he could. And he, in his turn, would ask, “Has Fernando Ulloa seen the law? Where is it? Is it true that it says every campesino must be the owner of the plot of land he works? Will the ranchers no longer be able to call themselves the owners of great expanses of land and evict towns that were established there centuries before?”

Pedro recalled the exoduses of his childhood. His parents had their hut, their cornfield, in a village that no longer exists. Suddenly the troops came and threw them out with blows from the butts of their rifles; the soldiers went off with the sheep and chickens and left them in the middle of a road with the few belongings they had been able to save and no shelter to sleep in. They looked for a place to settle on the highest and most barren hill, until they were thrown out of there in turn.

“And my parents had titles, papers. It did them no good at all.”

At times a sudden storm made Fernando and his companions run to take shelter beneath a tree, in a sheepfold or in an Indian family’s hut.