Among the many rooms of the parish house, Padre Manuel chose those where the ravages of abandonment were least visible and made them his sister’s bedroom and his own.

His bedroom furniture wasn’t luxurious or austere, just inappropriate. It consisted of an enormous walnut bed, what they call a matrimonial bed, which was donated by a rich, devout widow who hadn’t resolved to divest herself of the mattress as well. Padre Manuel didn’t want to alleviate the lack of a mattress even with the heap of hay suggested by Xaw, and preferred to lie on the hard wooden boards.

“You Indians sleep on the ground”—he offered the example with forced joviality. “What am I made of, that I can’t take anything but softness?”

“You are a Ladino, padrecito.”

Ladino! In Ciudad Real, Padre Manuel could be proud of a status he shared with the rich and powerful. But in San Juan it was an ambiguous privilege which provoked mistrust, fear and aggression in those beneath him.

“We are all equal in the eyes of Our Lord,” Padre Manuel affirmed resentfully.

Xaw nodded with a silent smile. Neither respect nor his shaky command of Spanish would allow him to continue the discussion. But an uncontainable wave of repulsion was growing inside him. Was this man not an imposter?

The rest of his furniture consisted of a table of ocote pine, good enough for writing but heavily scarred by use, two leather armchairs so low to the ground that no one but a dwarf could have been comfortable in them, and some other chairs, also made of ocote pine, which were flimsy and unstable. Presiding over this laughable decor was a crucifix. An ivory crucifix. A gift from Don Alfonso when Manuel finished his first year of study at the seminary.

Padre Manuel always kept the crucifix with him. He did so out of habit and a kind of superstitious attachment. Now the two of them had wound up in the parish house of San Juan Chamula. But did this chunk of matter make the priest’s solitude any more tolerable, his helplessness any less piercing? Manuel shifted his eyes away from it almost with reproach.

There were few reasons indeed for contentment. His first visit to the church left him dumbfounded. Was it possible that only a short distance away from Ciudad Real, the seat of the diocese, Christianity had failed to penetrate? Was it possible that no one had noticed or denounced the fact that the natives were practicing a warped religion? Thanks to Don Alfonso’s warning, Manuel had anticipated a certain level of idolatry, the level a converted people always introduces into Catholicism, and which Catholicism tolerates and absorbs. But what he found in San Juan went far beyond anything he could have imagined and revealed a state of absolute paganism.