The next day, the new mother entered the steam bath with the baby. In the wet heat that the stones exhaled, Marcela became acquainted with her son. The skin was a sturdy color and he had the tenacious almond-shaped eyes of her race. But the hair was curly, like a Caxlán’s. Marcela was repulsed; she Rejected him.

The child would be brought up in Catalina’s lap. She was his godmother and chose his name: Domingo Díaz Puiljá, after her and Lorenzo’s father. She believed this would perpetuate their father’s memory. But everyone called the child something else: “the one born at the eclipse.”

VI

CHAPTER VI

WHEN PEDRO GONZÁLEZ WINIKTÓN ceased to serve as a judge in the capital of Chamula, he returned with his family to the village of Tzajal-hemel.

Everything spoke of abandonment, in the hut, the animal pens, the cornfield. The roof’s palm thatching had worn away in large rents through which wind whistled and rain dripped. The doors no longer fit their frames and in the corners cobwebs dangled, thick, dirty and torn.

A fallow period had not made Winiktón’s plot of land more fertile. On the contrary, the cornfield’s furrows were overrun with weeds; rainstorms had opened up innumerable deep channels and the field’s borders had been demolished by animals that grazed there, placid and unpunished.

Pedro, helped as much as possible by his brother-in-law (the women were busy with the household tasks and herding the flock), worked eagerly. He planted the field on the auspicious day, watched over the growth of the corn, freeing it of cizakas and entrusting it to the timely arrival of the rains.

The season progressed, serene and without disturbances; for many it was a fruitful one. But Winiktón’s harvest did not correspond to his efforts or his needs. The slopes where his corn was planted were too steep; the small, irregular and stony patch of ground no longer yielded much. The future would only make the scarcity they were now enduring grow worse.

Nevertheless, the rent had to be paid on time, in work and in cash, to the owner of the land, a Ladino who lived in Ciudad Real.

Mealtimes in Winiktón’s family were quiet. Pedro polished off his food quickly without daring to lift his eyelids so as not to see the faces of those around him. In every gesture, every expression, he read a recrimination, a useless cry for help. And the child, hanging in a net bag in the center of the shack, cried desperately from hunger.