Catalina pushed the pot of beans (now steaming) to within her husband’s reach. But the Tzotzil dignitary did not notice it. He was absorbed in his thoughts. The beans, untouched, gradually stopped steaming. Then Catalina asked, “You are not going to eat?”

Pedro said no with a gesture. His wife kept her eyes on him, alert and frowning. Winiktón was always reserved, little given to expansions and confidences. So the scarcity of his words could not alarm her. But muteness was usually his way of concentrating more deeply on what surrounded him. And this time Pedro was paying no attention. He was distracted, absent.

Did he dislike it that Catalina had made the decision to bring a guest into the house without asking for his consent? One more mouth, he could be thinking. But in exchange for that, Catalina would have someone to help her with the heaviest work. Catalina. . . . By what right did a barren woman like her try to elude the arduousness of her duties? On the contrary, she should compensate for her shortcoming by outdoing everyone else in her abnegation. Yes, that was what Winiktón was thinking deep inside himself; Catalina had the bitter satisfaction of reading his mind. And rebelliousness welled up like a gush of blood in her chest. Was it her fault she had no children? Was there any measure, however painful, however repulsive, she had not taken in her attempts to cure herself? All of them turned out to be useless. She has a cold womb, the women diagnosed mockingly. She was marked with an evil mark. Anyone could look down on her. Anyone. But not Pedro, not her husband.

Filled with animosity, Catalina turned toward Winiktón, seeking in his expression the evidence that would condemn him. What she found was a countenance flayed by an anguish so dire as to mortify anyone who could look at it. Catalina sought, among all names, one, to throw like a veil over this sight. But what name does suffering have when it is endured by the being we love? Catalina suddenly blew on the candle. The flame went out.

“It is time to sleep.”

Quick sounds were heard, small domestic noises. There followed the vast nocturnal silence, the silence that becomes more compact, more real, when the coyotes howl, when the fainthearted crickets chirp.

Pedro lay down with his back to his wife. His breathing was rhythmical, as if he had gone to sleep. Catalina measured the breathing to measure the depth of his anguish.

“He thinks of nothing now; he thinks of no one.”

And this certainty calmed her.

But Winiktón was pretending, doing what some animals do when threatened with great danger: closing the eyes, stiffening the body, mimicking death. Because injustice was there, crouched in one of the corners of the hut.