In the space left between them the musicians had set up the dance floor, whose waxed, polished tiles would make the dancing fast and weightless.

On the gallery’s pillars were lighted torches of ocote pine that burned with an ample flame, crackling and fragrant with resin. Around the slenderness of other pillars were twined palm fronds and ivy runners.

Seats were lined up along the sides—long wooden benches and folding chairs, so the dancing couples could rest. Inside, along the walls of the receiving rooms, were the places reserved for the older people, the placid, respectable people who couldn’t be exposed to the weather’s fickleness. Old men with little lashless eyes and a worried, malicious gaze. Married women blooming with motherhood, their small, plump hands, constellated with rings, crossed in their laps. Standing near the doors were the gentlemen. All wore black suits, though some had opted for a pair of eye-catching yellow shoes as the final touch on their outfits, rather than the traditional patent leather slippers. These were the newly rich, coarse people suddenly come up in the world due to a favorable fluctuation in the price of coffee, cattle dealers who sold their herds in Guatemala, bootleggers. Ciudad Real’s proudest families tolerated them at their gatherings but made them pay a high price in gibes and loans for admission.

The priests, wrapped in the severity of their dark cassocks, were at the center of other groups: spinsters, beyond all hope by now, who spoke to them in a manner at once protective and submissive; unmarried women who had seen the best years of their youth go by without yet resigning themselves to defeat but without daring to compete at a disadvantage, and who pretended to disdain such amusements by demonstrating their affinity for serious, moral discussions; married women who made a show of the sway they held over their husbands by forcing them to pay tithes to the church and who expected special consideration from members of the clergy for that reason. And finally, timid men who were uncomfortable with the crude expressions and manners of the other men and incapable of approaching the eligible women and so came to breathe this asexual and insipid atmosphere.

The servants came and went offering glasses of various liquors—from the harsh comiteco which more than a few ladies accepted without putting up a fuss, to the cloying fruited mistelle made with peach, apple or jocote. There were slices of cold meats, crunchy cracklings, and cream cheese to nibble on.

The buzz of voices, faint laughter, bursts of merriment, grew and expanded, filling the whole house. The master of the house, Leonardo Cifuentes, could not complain. No one had turned down his invitation. The party was a success.