Marcela remained still. She raised to Catalina a pair of eyes in which admiration and respect fought to be the only emotion manifested. By what means had this woman ascertained what Marcela had confessed to no one, what she herself did not know? She was a very powerful ilol, there could be no doubt. Marcela rejoiced at being under her authority. In her mind, she repeated the phrase, savoring it: “A Caxlán made ill use of her.” This was what had happened. Something that could be said, that other people could hear and understand. Not vertigo, not madness. She sighed, relieved.

But in Winiktón’s eyes, the phrase gave off a very different light. As if the years had not gone by and he, still a teenager and from the powerlessness of his youth, was gazing upon a sickening sight: his youngest sister, her foot pierced by the nail with which a Caxlán had secured her to the floor so he could consummate his abuse. Seeing the blood that ran from the wound (slow, thick, black), Pedro let out a wild scream and pounded the earth furiously. At his back, among murmurs of disapproval, a bolt of lightning was unsheathed: the word justice. Who spoke it? None of the impassive mouths had been scorched by its fire. One by one Pedro questioned the men of the council, the oldest among the elders. No one answered. If the ancients possessed this notion, they did not pass it down to their descendants. So Winiktón could not test the term’s worth. Nevertheless, each time his race suffered under the Ladinos’ highhandedness, the syllables of the word justice resounded inside him like the bell around the eldest ewe’s neck. And he walked blindly behind it, along steep and perilous trails, without ever catching up to it.

Later, Winiktón attached himself to Xaw Ramírez Paciencia, the sacristan of the parish church of Chamula, a solitary man who lived in the belltower and furtively sucked the tips of his fingers, impregnated with the taste of charred candle wick, oil and varnish. Xaw insisted on imitating the gesticulations of the priests, which, in his awkwardness, he caricatured. He mumbled prayers in a language called Latin which was even more impenetrable than Spanish, and then suddenly collapsed, struck down by a drunkenness without exaltation or reveries. But he had assisted men of reason, the priests. He had listened to them speaking in former days, and he was a man of long memory. At Winiktón’s insistence, he gradually yielded until he finally revealed the only thing he knew: that justice is the task of judges. And then Pedro wanted nothing more than to be an adult, to hold in his hands the scale that weighs the actions of men.

He achieved what he set out to achieve. He was appointed a judge.