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have been privileged to see the working of their minds, the uncompromising qualities of their ethical standards. There had to be the language, even though he was as yet clumsy in it. And he had to have been there, helpless, for week after week, gaining through his helplessness a kind of acceptance. He knew his recovery had awed them. They knew of wounds and sickness, and they had an atavistic awareness of the closeness of death. Now they knew he had lived because he had to live, because there was a mission of honor involved. They could understand that. There was, in them, an instinctive knowledge of the interaction of mind and body. They knew of the bullfighter, one of the greatest ones, who, after escapes bordering on the miraculous, had finally been gored and, in fear, in humiliation, in superstitious terror, had looked at his own blood and had said, “I die,” and had died of a horn wound not superficial, yet not nearly grave enough to cause death.
    These people had stood atop pyramids at dawn and with an obsidian knife cut the living heart from an enemy, holding it up toward the rising sun, still pulsing in the hand of the priest. And, on the other side of the blood, they had stood bound in fire and died without scream or terror.
    He watched them and felt his own blood was watery, his emotions pallid, all his angers merely spite, all his loves like spun sugar, all his juices like thin gruel.
    Finally, wearied, he slept with his face to the wall, slept through the dancing and the singing and the time of the telling of stories that came later and lasted until the most distant peaks, the highest ones to the west, were touched with the first fire-glow of morning.
    Soon he was able to walk to the other huts. There were eight altogether, as well as some outbuildings for storage. When he knew where the others lived, it was much easier to remember names and to sort out the confusing relationships. No one seemed unwilling to talk of the night of death and terror five years before. All told of miraculous escape, and he guessed that the difficulties of each individual escape had been enhanced in each retelling. Armando and Concha had, he thought, escaped as a family, with less loss than others. Then he learned that Armando’s wife, who had been older, and grown sons and their wives and children had perished. Concha had lost her husband and one child, but had saved the two elder boys and had given birth to Felipe on the way to the valley.
    When he learned that, he asked Rosario how Armando and Concha had been able to marry. Rosario thought that a great joke. He said that Roberto, who could read, had read what seemed to be an appropriate passage from the holy book and had, in the name of the exiles from Pinal Blanco, pronounced them man and wife. He asked Rosario what was funny and it took him some time to understand Rosario’s explanation. It seemed that Concha had not been married before. True, she had lived with a man and called him husband and he called her wife, and the children had taken the proper name from such a union, but really there were very few couples in Pinal Blanco who had been married. You see, the priest came for one mass very late each Sunday, and he was always in a hurry. A civil wedding was possible if one cared to travel by bus all the way to Zimapan, but the buses did not run often, and it was expensive. The priest would marry, but at a fee of ninety pesos, and that was far beyond the reach of most couples. So it happened that by the time a couple had the money and the chanceto be married, there were children to be cared for, and it was odd to go with one’s children to be married, and anyway the situation was accepted by the others, so few bothered. And, he said, it was the same in all the remote villages of Mexico. Here, in the valley, marriage was easy and very cheap. Yes, the Mayor of Pinal Blanco could have performed marriages, but Rosario could remember five mayors and not one of them ever acquired