Delgado walked away.

Raul won the game, and they sat down by the armoire. Her pale blue scarf loose over her arm, Angelina poured them another brandy and handed him his with an absent smile. She was thinking now of their children, of the fun they had had today, at the mill.

"Salud," she said, raising her glass.

He raised his glass, but glanced away.

"I'm taking grain to the huts at Sector 15," he said. "Father has cut off the corn supply from that sector."

"It must have been necessary to punish someone," she said. There was a pause. He did not bother to correct her assumption. "Do you think we can drive to Colima this week? I'd love to buy some things—it would be nice to go to town; we haven't been to town together for several weeks."

"I'll try," he said. "I think we can go."

A bat skittered close to the ceiling and then flew round and round the room, keeping near the walls. They watched it silently. It seemed such a small brown spot, in such haste, dipping between the candles on the armoire.

"What an ugly thing!" Angelina said.

"Manuel," Raul called.

When Manuel appeared, Raul pointed to the bat and said, "Drive it out."

Manuel brought his wide-brimmed hat, waved it, and chased the bat outdoors. He said nothing, but the way he moved expressed acceptance and pleasure. He had the grace of an old cat.

After Manuel went out, Raul said: "I've been thinking about Manuel, how he and I used to fly kites. He would take the kite on top of the house, where the roof's flat. We'd let out balls of string. He must have been thirty years old then. I remember his face—so full of smiles. He was patient with me. He knew the things a boy wanted to do. Horses. Hunting." His voice trailed off. He lit his pipe.

"He'd do anything for you," Angelina said, and rose abruptly. "Let's blow out the candles. You and Manuel have been true to each other. That's a fine thing." Then in a high voice, she added: "A fine thing."

He tried to disregard the inference. He puffed out a candle and watched her bend over another atop the armoire. The ivory light flared across her polished features. Sadness stabbed him: their marriage should have worked. Who had made the first mistake? Gradually, like a candlelit picture, Lucienne's face appeared, hazel eyes serious.

2

The hacienda of Petaca dated from 1619. The deed—signed in Colima—lay in a cedar jewel box in the living room. The Jesuit paper (some lawyer had gotten hold of ecclesiastical stationery) bore the cross-and-crown watermark. Flowery signatures in brown ink were fading into the foxed sheets that had frayed and chipped edges.

Petaca stretched over 1,580,000 acres: sugarcane fields, corn land, wheat land, cattle country, hills, valleys, rivers, lava beds, half a volcano, a lagoon, a pre-Columbian pyramid, villages with their gardens and orchards. The main house was thirty miles from Colima, the capital of the state. Peasants of the neighboring haciendas had dubbed Petaca the "Hacienda of the Clarín." Their ironical name referred to Raul's father, not the mockingbirds in the grove behind the residence. He had made many a man "sing." The nickname, said with a ttck of the tongue, conveyed their condemnation.

Fernando Medina, the Clarín, lay in bed, propped on pillows. His bed faced a tall grilled window, its wooden shutters flung back. As he lay against his pillows, one hand twitched nervously. He was seventy-nine, white-headed, ashen and scrawny, part Coro, part Spanish. Bowled over by a stroke, he still had a patriarchal air. His eyes could still explode. The white eyebrows, though thin, arched imperially. Decaying and absent teeth had crumpled his mouth; only when he was angry could it regain its forcefulness; at all other times it mocked the man. Don Fernando had been rebellious. As a young fellow, he had quarreled with his father over a trivial matter and shot and killed him. This was the venom of his life. No law had punished Fernando.

As he lay against his pillow, his hand trembling, he coughed and moaned. He hated inactivity; he hated being alone; he hated his room; lifting a small copper bell from the bed table, he clanged it erratically. As his hand quivered more violently, he plunged it under the sheet and pinned it down.

"Did you ring, Don Fernando?"

"Of course I rang. Bring me a cigarette and light it, Chavela."

"But Dr. Velasco asked me not to ... you..."

"Get a cigarette and be quick about it! Don't tell me what Dr. Velasco said, and don't run to him with your prattles."

"Sí, Don Fernando," she said, cringing a little.

As he waited for the cigarette (she had to go to the kitchen for a light), he eyed the grilled window. The bronze bars had a chunk of landscape wedged between them: a strap of corn land with giant chirimoya trees beyond. The chirimoyas had green limbs, and their mat of branches formed an umbrella cap of foliage. Don Fernando's sight was weak and branches did not exist for him. The umbrella seemed to float in mid-air. The effect annoyed him. He clanged his bell.

Chavela, a fat Tarascan peasant in her twenties, hurried back, a cigarette in one hand and a charcoal ember in the other. Pincher-wise she gripped the glowing ember between splints of wood, tongs she had improvised.

"Light my cigarette, you fool, before the charcoal falls on the bed! Did you have to bring it here? Don't you ever think for yourself?"

Chavela's broad chocolate face looked troubled; her big steady hands seemed to lift on strings as she brought the ember to the tip of her cigarette and puffed violently, close to Fernando's bed. Smoke corkscrewed from her nose and mouth, and she frowned and coughed, and then grinned. Carefully, she placed the cigarette between his lips.

"There," she said. For a second, her eyes narrowed; she turned away, repelled, and as she turned, the ember dropped alongside the bed.

"You could have burned me!" wailed Fernando. "Where's Angelina? ... get her!"

"She's outdoors, playing with the children."

"Playing with the children: doesn't she do anything else? Doesn't anybody do anything here?"

A heavy tread outside Fernando's room made Chavela glance toward the door; a spur dragged its wheel over tiles; it was Jorge Farias, the corn-production manager, a hungry-looking man, half Spanish, half Tarascan. He removed his wide-brimmed straw hat as he halted in the bedroom doorway; the rough brim scraped across his trousers.

"Farias wants to see you," said Chavela, and went out.

"May I come in?" asked Farias.

Don Fernando motioned him inside with childish gesture. As Farias entered, the old man spat on the floor.

Farias was dressed in soiled brown trousers and a white shirt designed like a four-pocketed jacket, he had on black riding boots spurred with star-shaped rowels, polished from use. He stood stiffly erect. He disliked the old man. Nearly fifty, he felt that his years of service, doled out to the Clarín, had been largely wasted; yet he liked his job and was proud of any help he could render his own people whenever Fernando's vigilance slackened.

"Can't you bear to look at me?" said Fernando.

"I'm at your service," said Farias.

"Sit down ... sit down!"

The spurs dragged. The chair by the window squeaked. Farias supposed he would be told to check the crops along the boundary line of the Santa Cruz del Valle hacienda, where it adjoined Petaca. He dreaded the journey through the mountains, but remembered he could take his son along, unless the Clarín had another job for Luis. But the Clarín's mind was slipping. Last week, he had ordered Felipe locked in the pillory; Felipe had not been guilty of stealing; it had been Carlos Vasconcales who had robbed the corn bins; nothing Farias could say had altered the Clarín's decision. Farias studied a crack in the red tiles; the crack wandered like a river toward the old man's bed. Farias found himself