“Won’t it be our turn soon?”

“No risk of that. Coffee can only be profitable when it’s grown on large expanses of land. What’s more, who disputes our ownership of the land? We didn’t take it away from the Indians.”

“Fortunately the Indians only pass through here.”

“Even when they decide to stay.”

“They can’t take the heat.”

“Order, please, gentlemen! We’re getting away from the matter at hand.”

“The girls will have to wear regional costumes.”

“Don Adolfo, your daughters will lead the way, as usual.”

“We’ll have to hold a banquet at the Coffee Planters’ Club.”

“And why not an outing to the sea?”

“Too rigorous. . . .”

“It’s all part of the fun. Anyway, they say the president is a very simple man, very approachable.”

But not in the way the landowners would have wanted him to be. The president had very little time and didn’t want to waste it in homages but used it to meet with people; at an early hour, his hotel room was open to the avalanche of citizens who wanted to speak to him: campesino groups, workers’ committees, widows wanting scholarships for their children, people requesting jobs, aspiring political appointees. The president listened to all of them with the same respect, the same attention. His green eyes, so surprising in that tanned face, interrogated, discovered, assessed.

The landowners organized a hasty conclave.

“The president has said he wants to visit one of our fincas.”

Every one of them would have wanted to offer his own. But prudence held them back. How to outfit an unpresentable house in such a short time? Where to hide the querida and the bastard children? How to make the peons’ barracks look like dwellings fit for human habitation?

“We’ll have to take him to La Constancia, Don Adolfo.”

The man they were speaking to smiled affirmatively. Here is where my abstemious ways, my habits of order and cleanliness, my faith in progress, my foreigner’s virtues find their public recompense at last, he seemed to say.

The president visited La Constancia. Proudly its owner displayed the machinery that processed the coffee beans and the groves that were in season. The committee visited the enormous embankments where the beans were drying and the warehouses where the coffee was stored. Don Adolfo was on the lookout for his visitors’ approval and when it came he reddened with pleasure.

During the meal, conversation turned toward the new laws enacted by the government. This was the moment Don Adolfo was waiting for. Though it was not on the program, he suggested that, to help their digestion, they take a stroll through the parts of the finca reserved for its employees.

The president and his entourage saw the sheds that served as dormitories, the bustling kitchen and the school.

“We strive to carry out your mandates, Señor Presidente,” said Don Adolfo, “insofar as our means will permit.”