In the meantime, people’s interest had to be sustained, their hatred had to be incited. Toward that end, a rancher had a group of Indians sent down from his ranch in the mountains. They brought no goods with them and on the express orders of their patrón all of them carried machetes and rifles.

Their faces, their presence, were enough to make the people of Ciudad Real rush into the streets. Screaming, they launched their attack. The soldiers couldn’t rescue the Indians from the fray until more than one of them had been wounded.

The Indians slept in Ciudad Real’s jail that night, and the next day they were taken by Leonardo Cifuentes, his partisans, and the guards, to the state capital.

Before the peevish and incredulous governor, the Indians were accused of trying to take Ciudad Real by assault and of conspiring together to plan a vast uprising. The interrogations, carried out through an interpreter, clarified nothing because the accused were unaware of the meaning of terms such as take by assault and “vast uprising.” They answered every question yes or no, as it struck their fancy, without distinguishing between what incriminated them and what absolved them.

The Indians pleaded to be allowed to speak to their patrón because he was the only one who could put an end to the confusion. The patrón denied ever having seen them before and the Indians were declared justifiably imprisoned and confined to the Tuxtla jail.

But the governor found excuses for refusing to accompany the gentlemen on their return trip to Ciudad Real, and for postponing the mobilization of the troops. He managed to appease them only by promising to put the screws on that rebel Fernando Ulloa.

XXVIII

CHAPTER XXVIII

WHAT NEITHER FRIENDLINESS nor persistence had accomplished was now being made possible by danger. Julia Acevedo planned out a complex series of maneuvers to make the ladies who gathered at Leonardo Cifuentes’ house do so at the home of his mistress instead. The advantages were obvious and numerous: first and foremost, Julia was younger and more eager to please than Isabel, who only rarely appeared, and whose manner was always forced, irritable, bored or mocking when she did.

The first to desert was Idolina. Her advice, help and orders sped up the transformation of the Ulloa house’s empty rooms into parlors for receiving guests.

Prices were not dickered over when the furnishings were acquired. The illustrious families who were ridding themselves of these relics of a glorious past, now fallen into decline, rubbed their hands together in satisfaction at a good deal. Hired hands from Cifuentes’ ranches moved in whole dowries’ worth of graceless, heavy furniture. Its merits resided in the lasting quality of the materials, the meticulousness of the craftsmanship. And in having belonged to famous, opulent ancestors whose portraits had also been put up for sale.