staring at Don Fernando. Cigarette smoke hooded his face—a falcon's hood of gray.

"I want you to leave here early tomorrow. Check the crops along Santa Cruz del Valle. Go armed."

"Yes, sir."

"There's something else. Check the stone fences along our property; take time to fix them if they're down; we can't have cattle foraging on our corn. Understand?"

"Yes, sir. I'll check thoroughly. Anything else?"

"Expect trouble.... You may go."

Fernando attempted to see Farias walk to the door, but his eyes had shifted out of focus; he saw a brownish blur; he shook himself and waited. The click of spurs faded. He raised his cigarette and inhaled deeply. Slowly, his sight cleared. The window and its barred landscape returned. He welcomed the sight now, thinking of death with a throb of panic: death would remove all landscapes, however blurred. His shaky hand carried the cigarette to his mouth and then let it fall. He slept.

He dreamed of a fracas over the impounding of a stream on the lower slope of the volcano; that quarrel had taken place thirty or more years ago; yet now, in the dream, the angry voices of workers rose; his administrador drew a revolver; a peasant yanked away the gun....

Waking, Fernando clattered his copper bell, and this time his son appeared.

"Yes, Father," said Raul, near the bed.

"A drink of water."

"Yes."

Raul poured a glass of water from a bed-table water bottle; a great green fly buzzed about the mouth of the bottle; his father reached for the glass; the hand shook and drops spilled.

The room had been papered in egg-white paper with brown aviaries triangled on it; from every aviary a flock of birds—all resembling swallows—cascaded. A black wooden wardrobe that weighed half a ton filled one wall. Its double doors, sides, and corners were ornamented with carved eagles and brass gewgaws. Some of the eagles had conch-shell eyes. The eyes peered into a full-length mirror, framed in carved wood. Above a washstand hung a Swiss etching of the Matterhorn, a sketchy rendering. Fernando's bed was four-posted and canopied with a dingy white cloth.

Raul glimpsed himself in the mirror as he held his father's glass, and the reflection startled him. Catching the resemblance, he set down the glass with a jerk and began to walk out of the room.

"Raul," said his father.

"What is it, Father?" said Raul, compelling himself to speak politely.

"I sent Farias to check the corn fences."

"He'll check them carefully," said Raul.

"Will Velasco come this afternoon?"

"He'll come unless he has a sick person to take care of."

"I feel bad. I feel as if ... Raul, it's bad."

"But you've felt that way before."

"Yes, I have. Still, I feel...." He said no more.

"Velasco usually comes about seven."

"Very well," said Fernando.

Raul waited, and as he waited, standing in the door, his father dozed. He called Chavela and instructed her to check from time to time. Stepping into the patio, he paused to take in the warm sun; he felt more like himself as he assimilated the light and air, heard laughter in the kitchen, and listened to the twittering and jabbering of parrots, thrushes and doves in their wall cages, cages that decorated all sides of the patio. A stone fountain centered the patio. Many years ago, the pink stones had been brought by oxcart from a prehistoric pyramid in Sector 9. Carved snakes wound from stone block to stone block, to vanish, with reptilian grace, over the rim. Raul sat on the curb, under the cypress. A dragonfly rode a lily pad. Where bougainvillaea climbed the wall a white butterfly, as big as a woman's cupped hands, descended: it seemed to be coming down an aerial stairway a step at a time. Raul shut his eyes, wanting to forget his problems, the ugly face of his father, the threat of dissolving traditions.

Presently, he went to the stable where Chico stood, brushed and saddled, tail switching. Manuel was polishing the cantle, chatting with other men; hens and roosters scratched in the floor straw; the air boomed with flies.

"The sacks are on," said Manuel, punching a corn sack behind Chico's saddle.

"Let's go, then," said Raul. "Are you ready?"

"I'm all set," said Manuel.

The palomino's beauty was obvious in many ways: bone structure, slant of ears, line of hocks, texture of mane and tail. Chico swung his head to watch Raul mount; his teeth ground his bit slightly. Lagoon and volcano came alive as the men rode side by side, Manuel on an Arabian bay. Each rider had a western saddle ornamented with silver, tasseled with red. They left the hacienda by the main road, lined on both sides with eucalyptus trees, four and five feet in diameter and fifty to sixty feet tall. The fragrant foliage sweetened the air; birds sang; dust puffs fitted like leggings around the horse's hoofs. Manuel's Arabian carried the heaviest sack of corn, but did not seem to mind. Raul packed a revolver in a new holster. Manuel had two pistols slung on a full cartridge belt. Both were dressed in white and wore straw hats with quail feathers under the bands.

Again volcano and lagoon swung with the riders; at a curve in the road, with the shore line close, ducks swam across the volcano's reflection. The double line of eucalyptus rambled on, but at the end of the lane, where a road intersected, they spread into a grove. Close to the grove, a white wooden cross pegged a hill. A tall man was looping dried marigold strands on an arm of the cross, his back toward Raul and Manuel. When he heard the horses, he faced about, his face luxuriously bearded with curly white hair. Picking up his hat out of the weeds, he walked toward the road.

"It's Alberto, the musician," said Raul, pleased.

"Ah, so it is. I hear he's been very sick," said Manuel.

"Good morning," said Alberto, smiling, bowing a little, big hat dangling in front of his stomach, gripped by both hands. His immaculate whites must have been ironed that morning.

"Good morning, Alberto," said Raul. "Sorry to hear you've been sick. I didn't know. How are you feeling?"

"Ai, patrón, I feel better, thank God. My legs troubled me. I'm old ... it is nothing. It will pass."

"When are you coming again to play for us?"

"Soon—God willing."

"Here's something for you."

Alberto limped close to Chico and patted his mane. The horse shied and blew through his nose, clicking his bit.

"Steady now, Chico," Raul said, and handed a few coins to Alberto. The old man accepted the money graciously, jingling it before pocketing it. For Raul, there was Christ in Alberto's face, the Christ of his own hacienda, of many haciendas. A few thorns, he thought, a few drops of blood ... He remembered Alberto at a fiesta years before: a drunk had struck him in the mouth. Alberto had toppled. Yet he had not complained. The jingle of coins in the open air, the cross on the hill, made Raul taste betrayal—he was offering the vinegar sop to his people. He hadn't the guts to free them! He jerked Chico's bit angrily, the horse reared, and Raul went on down the road.

Disturbed, Manuel eyed his friend doubtfully as they jogged along. Huts lay around another bend, and they rode slowly, over badly placed cobbles. The area was semi-arid, the soil rocky and alkaline. A few stone huts pimpled the ground among maguey and tangles of prickly pear and candelabra. Each hut resembled a cairn topped by a straw wig. The unmortared walls were made of lava, rough, porous, grayish-lavender. Big and suckling pigs slumped in front of a wooden watering trough that had a leak at one end; chickens fed here and there; dogs yapped at the horsemen.

Raul dismounted in front of a doorless hut, and began to pull off his corn sack, tugging at the leather thongs and henequen cords. A deep voice said, "Bueno," and Raul looked into the face of Salvador, the head man of the hutment, a three-hundred-pound fellow, with a paunch, a stevedore's shoulders, grinning jowl and swooping