Don Remigio spoke with convincing volubility and though he knew the Tzotzil language well enough, in these explanations involving numbers and calculations he preferred to use Spanish. So Pedro, although he made an enormous effort to follow his reasoning, had to resign himself to assenting blindly. Later, when all of them were sleeping in a heap in the doorway of the enganchador’s house, Pedro turned Don Remigio’s words over and over in his head.

“How is that?” he said to himself. “I leave my house, my family, my village; I walk for miles and miles down the mountain. I suffer from heat, my body aches with sickness; I do not idle the time away, lying all day in the hammock—I put in the full day. And when the hour arrives to return home, the result is that I return emptyhanded. To my way of seeing, this is not good. It is not just.”

Worried by this discovery, Winiktón yearned to share it with those lying nearby. They were sleeping deeply, snoring, and when Pedro tried to wake them they grumbled threateningly and, bundling themselves tighter in their blankets, fell back into their lethargy.

It was not yet dawn when the enganchados got underway. They went quickly and in silence; the rest periods were so short there was no time to do more than devour a mouthful or drink down a gulp of posol.

Nevertheless, Pedro spoke. Addressing those who could hear him, he said, “The agreement with Don Remigio is not just.”

“So? What did you expect? It was your fate to be born an Indian,” one of them answered, with a worried look at the capataz. The others nodded and hid their faces.

Indian. The word had often been thrown in his face, an insult. But now, spoken by someone of the same race, it served to establish a distance, to divide those who were united at the root. This was Winiktón’s first experience of solitude and he could not endure it without remorse.

‘T am the guilty one,” he reflected. “I separate myself from the others, I ponder things that are not legitimate.”

He promised himself he would erase the ideas that were obsessing his mind, but in the most unexpected moments, triggered by the most trivial details, they resurged. His efforts were also useless in another respect: the flow of confidence that had once united him with his companions was not re-established. There remained an unchanging mistrust, a reserve that the days made irrevocable.

The mountain range had gradually left behind its steep volumes, where even the eyes could not find rest, to settle into soft hills and, finally, expansive flatlands, swollen with a warm air of almost carnal density.