Statues lay on the ground where they had fallen, unrevered. Face down, nothing to protect them, exposed to a destruction the impatient Indians accelerated with abuse. Some were already missing their heads, others had broken hands, noses that had been chipped away, eyes that had fallen out. And the colors! They weren’t the colors of aging, of the natural deterioration of the wood, but greenish tones, a simulation of rot.

Padre Manuel’s first thought was that mere carelessness had left those images looking so preposterous. But he quickly became convinced that the Indians’ attitude toward them arose from an active desire to deface, humiliate and punish. Because other images had been treated differently, though Manuel would not have gone so far as to affirm that their fate was any better.

There were hated figures and favored figures. The Indians manifested their favor by swathing the sacred statue in rolls and rolls of fabric, producing an obesity that was increasingly out of proportion with the size of the body parts that remained uncovered. The disproportion could grow to a point where the figure lost its human form. The saints looked like enormous tortoises standing upright, with a tiny, timid human head emerging from the massive shell.

And what to say about the adornments? Palm-leaf hats, tiny mirrors that scintillated among the profusion of fabric, small jícaras, diminutive clay vessels.

When Padre Manuel wanted to find out why a certain painting of the sacrifice on Calvary had been draped over with a cloth, the sacristan’s solicitude in explaining things to him seemed to vanish, to be replaced by a reticent ambiguity. And when Padre Manuel tried to move aside the cloth to see what it hid, Xaw placed himself between the priest and the image, offering various incoherent reasons for his behavior. The priest didn’t think it was the right time to pursue the matter. He wasn’t going to bring the enmity of this people down on himself right now, when he had no weapon in his hand to fight with.

Benita, who was more intrusive, uncovered a painting of the Virgen Dolorosa on the pretext of cleaning the dust off of it. When Xaw came running, it was too late. The two women had already seen each other. And now, the sacristan lamented, danger was lurking in the motionless painted eyes.

Xaw himself was certainly disconcerting, too. As evidence of his own merit, he told Padre Manuel that during the period the parish had been unsupervised he, in his capacity as sacristan, had taken over the functions of the missing priest. For that reason, all the children born during that time had been baptized, no one had died without benefit of the last rites, and as far as cohabiting couples were concerned, they were a disgrace that other places could be ashamed of, but not San Juan. Xaw’s greatest pride was in having legalized all unions by a church wedding.