Pedro rested his head on a female lap, at peace. How different from his wife’s tense and always disappointed body was this docile flesh, humble in receiving pleasure, generous and skilled in giving it! The encounter took place without words, without the oaths by which Catalina called upon eternity.

After that night, Pedro could read, under the proud appearance of white women (all of them, even those in Ciudad Real), the secret avidity, the contraction of the supreme moment in which all masks melt away, the lawless repose that follows. They were no longer mythical beings made of a substance different from his own. They were females, yes, females: clay that the male hand shapes to fit its whims.

Such discoveries gave Winiktón a different perspective on things. He no longer felt inferior to anyone, and to proclaim his equality he abandoned his coarse cotton clothing to wear long pants and multicolored sweaters; he replaced his sandals with cheap shoes and, with a gift of money from Don Adolfo, he was able to buy himself a watch.

It was the custom of the enganchados to return to their villages displaying their acquisitions. From afar they announced their presence by playing a sad, monotonous melody on a new accordion, occasionally bursting into cries of joy and exultation.

The families, attracted by all the clamor, left huts and work to see the new arrivals. The children clapped with delight at the festive feeling that pulsated in the atmosphere. But the men turned their heads away with false indifference and the women’s mouths twisted in frank disapproval.

A few weeks later the tribe had reabsorbed the enganchados. One day they put the shoes away in the trunk because Chamula’s mud puddles and the rough terrain of its hills demanded more durable footwear. Another day, they pulled out the coarse cotton breeches and the wool serape because they were uncomfortable in garments that set them apart from the others. The accordion and the watch were sold in order to buy things that were more useful and more urgently needed. From their tongues, from their memories, the Spanish words were erased little by little until they disappeared.

Pedro, who upon returning had reassumed his rank as a former authority, rapidly yielded to the pressure of his group and by no external sign could a rebellion against traditions, an independent criterion for judging facts, an assimilation to Ladino ways, be detected in him. But in secret—in the same way Catalina exercised her powers as an ilol—Pedro went over his notebooks, repeating the lessons of his primers and remembering, with painstaking application, what he had learned in Tapachula.