“It is for your own good, my son. Even though you don’t believe it and right now it seems as if I’m being sarcastic, I have always been concerned about your future. And what future can you have if you stay in Ciudad Real? You are being watched, and they will have you on a very short leash. Are you going to resign yourself as I have? A quick mass, a cup of chocolate at the same hour every day, the regular gathering of your circle of friends, a nice fire in winter, a nice lamp at night. And prevaricating, and absolving mediocre sins, eunuchs’ sins.”

“Never!”

“You see? And if you were to attempt something, to organize assemblies, for example, the government would call it political. And come down on you fast and hard.”

“So then?”

“You have to get away from here. In this town of shyster lawyers, we priests are superfluous.”

“Yet we still have influence. I’ve seen the haughtiest gentlemen bow down to kiss your ring, Ilustrísima.”

“Yes, they do bend their knees but they no longer pay tithes. Never make any kind of alliance with the rich, Manuel. They always demand more than they give. The poor, on the other hand. . . . How consoling the Gospel’s promise is: ‘For ye have the poor always with you’! I had never fully understood it until today.”

Don Alfonso could pot help observing the incongruence between his exclamation and his furniture. He hastened to add: “You’ll say it’s easy to sing the praises of poverty from a comfortable chair after a delicious breakfast. But we bishops are obliged to keep up the protocol our position imposes on us.”

Padre Mandujano nodded. He was having a hard time following this lecture, whose direction he was unable to predict. The old man repeated, “You will have to leave.”

“To go where? On the coast they’re not exactly models of religiosity.”

“No, no. To the interior.”

“There’s nothing in the interior but Indians.”

“Whom our Holy Mother has abandoned to their fate for a very long time now.”

As if that mattered! Manuel was on the verge of answering. But he restrained himself in time.

“You are a Coleto before you are a priest, and therefore you’re accustomed to despising the Indians,” Don Alfonso continued. “In a Christian, this is a lack of charity. And in a politician— because you are one whether or not we want to acknowledge it —it is a miscalculation.”

Manuel’s lips parted in a smile.

“In our reckonings, the Indians are a quantity that does not count, Monseñor.”

“It hasn’t always been that way. Remember the missionaries in the early days of the Conquest.”

“And what was the result of all that? Failure. They were generous men, but mistaken. . . .”

“However, the Jesuits. . . .”

“They are indeed the true sons of light, as the Gospels define them: they have the wisdom of the serpent.”