“Please do not think I called you here so we could exchange comments on last night’s dance.”

Don Alfonso’s words seemed to awaken Manuel.

“Is it a serious matter, Monseñor?”

“No, not serious. A bit troublesome to your vanity, perhaps. And very awkward for the affection I bear you.”

This introduction augured yet another reprimand. Manuel mustered up all his calm in order to listen to it.

“Once again it has to do with your character, my son. Such vehemence, such outbursts. . . . Personally, I admire them. But the civil authorities have no grasp of subtleties and find your activities to be seditious.”

Manuel’s activities? The parish of San Diego was not centrally located. The parishioners were primarily families of antique lineage, left little by little at the outskirts of the town by the expansion of more recent powers-that-be. Without any inheritance other than their names, without any skill by which to rebuild their fortunes, without a craft by which to earn a decorous living, these families shut themselves up in houses that were half in ruins, turning their backs on a city that had ostracized them.

The demands of his ministry had allowed Padre Mandujano to step across the thresholds of those dwellings and see the gardens engulfed by weeds, the interior courtyards where the womens’ hands were eaten by lye, the dark rooms where useless objects accumulated.

He entered the rooms of the dying. What a rank smell of mold, unaired sheets, abolished future!

When he first arrived in San Diego parish, Padre Mandujano wanted to break through these peoples’ isolation, incorporate them into the community, make them participate in the interests and satisfactions of others. He failed. As the afternoons began to darken, the men of those houses still went to the closest cantina,] well muffled up in their cloaks, to drown the humiliation of their lives in cheap liquor. The women still slipped out surreptitiously to offer to sell their former friends a book from their grandfather’s library, the last silver spoon, the lace that had once adorned a legendary ballgown.

These rich people who had come down in the world and the craftsmen they lived among were like oil and water. Neighbors, pedestrians in the same streets, parishioners of the same church,] they neither spoke to one another nor acknowledged one another’s existence.