Because Marcela retained no more than a confused image of the violence she had suffered. Behind Cifuentes’ imperious, voracious movements (which she had resisted as animals do, instinctively, savagely, biting and scratching), Marcela glimpsed something. Not the same thing many women in her place would have seen: the pride of having been chosen by a Caxlán. Nor what others would have seen: the dangerous pleasure of arousing a brutal desire. No, Marcela had divined a paradise: the supreme abolition of her consciousness.

It was only an instant. Letting her hands fall slack, letting go of what she carried in them: misery, anguish. Surrendering it all and being left free. A painful murmur arrived from her body as if from a distant planet. But Marcela was far away, floating in a dense, warm, maternal atmosphere. Why had she been dragged out into the open again? She came back to herself, surrounded by shouting, a pursuer nipping at her heels. And she had run, away or back, she didn’t know. But how to go back, oh God, how to go back?

Seated on the sidewalk’s hostile edge, her knees together to support her abject forehead, Marcela swayed back and forth very slowly, making a hoarse cooing sound, like a fretful dove.

That’s the way. Now the lethargy is weighing your innards down with lead. That’s the way. Little by little, the dove is soothed. That’s the way.

Midday flew slowly by.

“Hey, look at that one. She’s pretty soused.”

Two boys, no more than eleven years old, were nudging each other toward Marcela. In their eyes, already tarnished by the spectacle of human degradation, glinted a spark of glee.

Marcela did not hear them. A buzzing was still drilling its way through her, a buzzing that said: Doña Mercedes Solórzano, Doña Mercedes Solórzano. And then the precipice, and then nothing.

“She’s acting kind of loony, isn’t she?”

“All right, so. . . .”

One of the boys took a slingshot from the pocket of his jeans, which had large patches at the knees. He loaded it with an orange peel that hit its target. Marcela opened a pair of eyes that were wide with shock, bewildered with fear.

“Yessss! Yessss!” the boys shouted, barricading themselves behind the corner, having provoked an anger that could not be vented.

Then the fear and shock were extinguished, as quickly as they had flared up; there was no fuel to feed the sudden blaze. Marcela lowered her eyelids again.

The boys, emboldened at having emerged unscathed from the first sally, were planning another more audacious one. But something held them back. They hid the slingshot and adopted a stance of innocent carelessness and an angelic expression that was contradicted by their tangled hair, dirty hands and disheveled clothes. The act was for the benefit of the two men who were approaching: Don Alfonso Cañaveral, bishop of Chiapas, and a young seminarist, Manuel Mandujano.