In conversations with the principal men, Pedro spoke of the president and his promises of justice. His listeners heard him with impatience and unease. The life of the Chamulas was laborious, but they were well acquainted with the routine of sufferings they inherited and passed on to their children. And suddenly here was this man speaking a new word which meant great upheavals. To say justice in Chamula was to kill the patrón, to raze the hacienda, to lie in ambush for the police, to resist the merchants’ abuses, denounce the enganchador’s manipulations, avenge the mistreatment of children, the rape of women. To say justice in Chamula was to keep a vigil, day and night, sustained only by the promise of a faraway man whose good faith no one had yet put to the test. It was preferable to remain silent.

“But I have seen him,” Winiktón repeated desperately. “I am the witness and the guarantor that what the great ajwalil says is valid.”

Xaw Ramírez Paciencia cleared his throat before answering.

“It is good, my son, that you keep the news of these things for more suitable times, for their proper season.”

The rest of them gravely agreed. The old men took their leave, crippled by a nameless anger they had no way of releasing. What had this upstart, this Pedro, said? That the generations to come would be exempt from or indemnified for the labors they had endured. Was their condition a chance circumstance then, which could be remedied? No: it was fate, the mandate of dark powers, the will of cruel gods. What a mockery of their beliefs, what a sneer at their life, their humble virtues, their submission, all now stripped of their merits if Pedro had spoken the truth!

Only the young men, whose spirits had not yet been wholly bridled, retained from these discussions a certain restiveness, a seed that would have to break through the hard crust of inertia and conformity in order to sprout.

VII

CHAPTER VII

DOÑA MERCEDES SOLÓRZANO had been keeping her store closed lately. The real reason Leonardo Cifuentes had set up a business for her in one of the outer rooms of his own house—not to line his pockets but as a front behind which she could arrange fleeting sexual adventures for him with the humbler servants and even the Indian women—was no longer important. Not that Leonardo had mended his ways or given up his pastime. But now all his interest, all his attention was focused on one woman, the woman who had been dubbed “La Alazana”—the Roan.