That crying followed the former judge wherever he went; in vain he went further and further up the mountain, chasing the fleeing tracks of a stag; in vain he dizzied himself in the tumult of the plaza; in vain he participated in the ceremonies. The baby’s cry went with him, rang out here and there, in the caves on the hill, at the corners of the market, near the church and the Cabildo. The baby’s cry only expanded in the great darkness of night when Pedro looked for a refuge and a truce in drunkenness.

The elders gave him advice.

“Do as we do, tatic; one cannot be like the animals, without a shelter or a corral. Seek the shadow of a patrón; he will help you when you are in need; he will stand beside you in hard times.”

This was what the old men said, but they did not talk about the humiliation, the exhaustion of the peon who lived permanently on the patrón’s estate, or of the temporary laborer whose own land was left uncultivated. And Pedro, who had been a man of authority in his tribe, whose most intimate acts and most secret thoughts were bound to his judge’s investiture, could not lower himself to become a Ladino’s footman, a ranch hand, a servant boy in a stately house.

Propped up with loans, grown accustomed to austerities, Pedro held out for one year more. But the harvest cheated him again. The child was crawling through the hut by now, thin and dirty. He no longer cried; he no longer had the energy to cry. He moaned softly and fell asleep next to the stones around the hearth where the embers glowed.

Pedro González Winiktón agreed to leave. When the enganchador arrived in San Juan to enlist a crew of indentured workers for the patrón of a lowland finca, the former judge requested that his application be noted down in the book.

When he was asked his name, he said Pedro González. He did not speak the name of his chulel; he safeguarded his soul from the strangers’ power; he left the deepest and truest part of his being out of the agreement.

The crew, made up of men from all parts of Chamula, went down to Ciudad Real first.

From the moment they walked away from their villages, a strange transformation came over them. They ceased to be Antonio Pérez Bolom, a harpist residing in Milpoleta, or Domingo Juárez Bequet, a hunter of mountain cats and a famous pulsetaker, or Manuel Domínguez Acubal, well-versed in questions of enchantment and witchcraft. They were only a fingerprint at the bottom of a contract. In their homes they left memory, reputation, personhood. What walked along the trails was an anonymous, solitary man who had rented himself out to another’s will, who had become estranged from other interests.