They had passed the highest point of the road and only a few scattered shreds of mist were left. The plain stretched out below, green and hot.

“When we get to Tuxtla. . . .”

“You have a lot of faith in the government.”

César was younger, more ignorant. Why, then, did he speak with such assurance?

“The men who govern Chiapas are used to obeying. The patrón is the patrón on his finca and also in the Palacio. His footsteps ring out loudly there, just like everywhere else.”

Evidently César had employed a figure of speech. Because in the Palacio de Gobierno in Tuxtla nothing could be heard but the clacking of the noisy and very antique typewriters, the murmurs in the waiting rooms, the docile steps of the employees and the governor’s orders.

He didn’t make Fernando Ulloa and his companions wait long. He supported the president’s agrarian policy across the boards, he said. And his administration was always ready to listen to a complaint, to remedy an anomaly. Fernando Ulloa accepted this cordial reception and this promise almost with disappointment. Now he became aware of how much he had wanted the authorities to be indifferent or even frankly biased in favor of the ranchers, so he could justify using the power César Santiago had shown him he possessed.

“Now then, what is your problem?”

The Governor, a simple, benevolent man of the tropics, leaned back as if preparing to hear a lengthy narrative. However, Ulloa preferred to be brief. He summarized the essential facts and emphasized the slant the ranchers of Ciudad Real wanted to put on the forthcoming expropriation of the fincas.

“The question is very clear,” Fernando concluded. “As Señor Tovar himself acknowledged when he refused to defend us, no man born in Ciudad Real or linked to it by financial interests can be a judge in this matter since all of them have something at stake in it. Therefore we’ve come to ask you to have the case thoroughly reviewed by skilled and unbiased individuals.”

The governor agreed to this request.

“I know their crafty ways, and we’re going to give them a taste of their own medicine. But,” he inquired with a hint of doubt, “no danger of an uprising in fact exists?”

The question seemed to be addressed to Pedro in particular. All eyes turned toward him.

“We will not be satisfied, ajwalil, while other hands hold the land that belongs to us. Until we have been given a paper that says who is the owner.”

The tone of the Indian’s words was civil but not to the point of being conciliatory or, far less, servile. He was holding back a last resort, the last resort despair leaves to the weak: violence.

Fernando Ulloa wanted to erase that impression.