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“He sobs so hard it is like he is having a seizure.”
    â€œWhy?” I say. “He is going to live.” It is our tradition that the worst criminal in the jail on the day of the Festival goes to the gallows. Ayala had been the only one behind bars; with the Festival so close, he must have expected he would hang. The capture of El Gris has spared him.
    â€œAyala wants to die,” Vargas says. “He wants to be with Concepción.”
    Concepción was Ayala’s wife and one of Vargas’s sisters. She died of the green fever six months ago. The night after she was buried, Ayala went to the bar and drank himself senseless. When the bells tolled midnight, he jumped up and overturned his table, smashed bottles, kicked the monkey into the wall, and ran out. He went to the cathedral, where he stripped off his clothes and relieved himself all over the front steps. “I piss on your apostles! I shit on your saints!” he said. He shouted this again and again, dancing naked around the cathedral as we gathered in a crowd. He stopped, suddenly, and with a look of sudden, rapturous knowledge—as if he’d just glimpsed Truth itself—he said, “I will burn your God to the ground.” The police came as Ayala was pushing through the crowd, asking people if they had any matches he could borrow.
    I open a crate of sapotes that was delivered this morning. “And El Gris?” I ask Vargas. “You have seen him?”
    â€œYes,” Vargas says. “He tries to comfort Ayala.” Vargas eyes the sapotes.
    â€œGo ahead,” I say. He chooses one and cuts into the fibrous brown skin with a pocket knife.
    â€œIt is sad to see Ayala,” Vargas says. “A naked man in a bare cell. Even though the police do not need him for the Festival anymore, they still will not give him his clothing. They are afraid of what he may do to himself.”
    â€œIt is San Humberto’s will,” I say. “We live because it is our duty to live.”
    â€œYou have never wanted to die?” Vargas asks. He cuts a crescent of pink flesh away from the rind.
    â€œWhat we want,” I say, “is irrelevant.”
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    I, too, lost my wife to a fever—to the fever of money and power that Lars brought to our town. It left Madalena dazed and desirous and vulnerable. Her note, which was delivered to me by Lars’ silk-clad coachman, made this plain: Lars can give the children everything you cannot. He is a gentleman and you are a boor. He is a respected businessman and you sell fruit of poor quality. At Mass the next morning, all of them—Lars, Madalena, Ysela, and Rubén—sat together, a false family looking down on the rest of us from Lars’s reserved seating area—which had been the choir loft until the bishop let himself be bought. I have not gone inside the cathedral since. Does San Humberto understand my reasons? I believe he does.
    Two years ago, Lars and Madalena traveled to the capital city for a vacation. He came back; she did not. Lars and his coachman claimed she was killed when a small and unknown band of rebels began catapulting boulders into the city from the surrounding hills. Whether that is true or not, Madalena is gone, and there is nothing I can do.
    The white marble tombstone that Lars’s unclean money bought is bigger than my house. It is a blindfolded angel pointing at the sky. When the shadows are longest, the wings of the angel darken forty-six other graves. I cannot read the epitaph because it is written in Latin. The final insult: the stone gives her surname as “De Los Pozos,” with capital D , capital L . What kind of man does not know how to spell his wife’s name? I asked Vargas if the stone could be corrected. “You do not have enough money,” he told me.
    Eventually Madalena would have come back to me. I know this. Lars made her forget what is good and what is right, but one day the great