However, as a tribute to hygiene, he installed a latrine in the shed where the Indians lived. He opened a school and paid a teacher for other reasons; the government’s new legislation had, of course, profoundly touched his Germanic instinct for obedience. Furthermore, he did not agree with the arguments by which his neighbors justified their failure to comply with the legislation.

“Your Indian who gets above himself is a lost Indian,” they said. “When those so-and-sos know how to read and write Castilla the devil himself won’t be able to handle them.”

“On the contrary,” Homel replied. “The Indians serve us grudgingly and since they aren’t very skilled they can’t be very useful to us. But with education everything will improve.”

Don Adolfo liked to pronounce words like that one: education. It awoke within him a nostalgia for a homeland whose memory was increasingly vague and capricious. A homeland where (since his reasons for emigrating were no longer at the forefront of his mind) all was prosperity and abundance, owing, naturally, to the primary and secondary schools and universities where education was dispensed. In America, however. . . . Climate and race were the determining factors in its backwardness, that much was clear —but only because both elements weakened mankind in its fight against ignorance.

“Educated men,” Don Adolfo would repeat, “make prosperous nations.”

And he imagined a world without misery, without conflicts, once all men had reached the same level of knowledge. The patróns of the neighboring fincas listened to Don Adolfo talk, their misgivings mingled with admiration. As a foreigner, it was his right to speak these grand words which in another man’s mouth would have seemed pedantic and out of place. But did he really know much about his adoptive country and this area of Chiapas if he thought measures that were effective in Europe wouldn’t be counterproductive here?

“When the Indians know what we know they’ll seize what is ours.”

Don Adolfo shrugged. He was old, and the thought that what he had put by would find its way into the hands of greedy sons-in-law did not move him to defend it.

So the school began to operate at La Constancia. The owners of the neighboring fincas stopped worrying about it when they saw that it had very scant success.

Classes were held at night, after the Indians had completed their day of hard labor and when echoes of the marimbas and exploding firecrackers with which the peons of other fincas were enjoying their leisure came from all directions.

The Indians did not openly oppose Don Adolfo’s order that they attend classes. They lowered their eyebrows submissively and murmured phrases of gratitude, though deep in their hearts they felt themselves to be the victims of a new abuse. That was why, as soon as the capataz looked away, they disappeared from his sight. They were discovered hours later under a tree somewhere, sleeping the heavy sleep of drunkenness.