Chapter 11

La Niña emerged from the crypt beneath the altar of the church of San Andrés to rain pounding the stained glass windows and gloomy shadows flooding the sanctuary. The smell of incense permeated the still air—the odor of sanctity, she thought with distaste. She could not wait to escape it and fill her lungs with the miasmatic air of the city, that familiar mixture of fried foods, flowers, sewage, wood smoke, charcoal, horse manure, eucalyptus, and all the other innumerable fragrances, exhalations, odors, stinks, and emanations that proclaimed life. For the past hour, she had knelt beside the tomb of her husband while the obsequious pastor of the church led her in a rosary to commemorate the anniversary of his death. She droned her way through the Five Glorious Mysteries, nauseated by the musty air and the black smoke pouring from the candles. They provided the only illumination in the final resting place of three centuries of dull-witted, haughty Gaviláns. Her own family—hacendados from Durango—buried their dead in a hillside graveyard beneath canopies of oak branches where horses grazed and lovers picnicked.

Her maid hurried to her side as she prepared to leave the church. She pushed open the door for her mistress and unfurled an enormous umbrella at the very moment La Niña left the church. She took a dozen steps to her waiting carriage. The driver, with long-perfected timing, threw back the door just as she reached the coach and assisted her inside. Her maid entered behind her, arranged a fox fur throw across her lap, and then departed to join the driver for the three-minute ride to the palace. La Niña, who had been tended to by servants since infancy, was only peripherally aware of their activity.

She was in a nostalgic mood, for as she had knelt in the crypt beside the dust that had been her husband, her thoughts wandered back to her girlhood in Durango. She had been born in 1831, ten years after Iturbide secured México’s independence from Spain. Her family’s vast holdings had been unaffected by the change in government—the cattle continued to graze, the corn and wheat continued to grow, the veins of silver still traced their delicate lines through the darkness of the mines—and hers was the childhood of a princess. Not, however, a confined princess of the city. She was a country aristocrat who, by day, rode horses, raced barefoot in the dust, and swam in the cold streams of the mountains. At night, she sat at her father’s table in silk and jewels, eating quail and fried squash blossoms off plates carried across the Pacific by the Manila galleons. Her childhood friends lived in the same careless opulence. When one of them, the son of a silver king, had married, the path from the bridal carriage to the church was paved with silver ingots. Silver was the foundation of all their fortunes and even the moonlight that filled her bedchamber seemed like a spray of silver.

It seemed, at first, that the romance would continue when she came to the city for her social debut. Her family had a fine house, a fine name, and wealth. The invitations poured in. There were candlelit balls, excursions to the Teotihuacán, where she stood at the peak of the Pyramid of the Sun, and long boat rides in the flowered canoes of Xochimilco. Although not as beautiful as other girls, she was fresh-faced and charmingly impertinent. She had a dozen suitors from which to choose a husband, but, as was the custom, her father made the choice: the dour Marqués of Gavilán, a widower fifteen years her senior. He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural, so dull in his conversation that she had to discreetly pinch herself to stay awake. She was crushed, but there was no question of defying her father. Moreover, she had loved the palace of the Gaviláns from the first time she entered it. Its immensity and decrepitude appealed to her romantic imagination and her patrician self-regard.

Forty-three years of marriage, three sons who died in childhood, four daughters who survived, and several reversals of fortune later, the marqués died. A prig to the end, he refused last rites from a priest whom he deemed unworthy of administering the sacraments to someone of his rank. She was secretly overjoyed when they sealed his casket in the crypt. Now, she thought, now she could begin to live again!

The decades of her marriage had curdled her gaiety into scorn, transformed her charming impertinence into sarcasm, bent her back, whitened her hair, and withered her limbs. The spurs of life still dug into her flesh, but her flesh could not answer as it had when she rode through the forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental or danced until dawn at Chapultepec Castle. The only passions left to her were the vicarious passions of art—literature, music, opera, and theater. Art allowed her to be young and alive in her imagination, if nowhere else. As she steeped herself in those realms of the imaginary, her human connections withered and became mere social rituals. Until José was born. Her last grandchild was beautiful and sensitive, like a storybook character come to life. He awoke a passionate and protective love within her that she had not felt for her own children. She would have adored him even had he not reciprocated, but he was as devoted to her as she was to him, and he shared her passion for art. He loved nothing more than to lie in her vast bed in the morning, listening to her tales of country life while Caruso played on the phonograph. Or, at least, he had until he became infatuated with his piano teacher. Now all he spoke of was this boy, and she discovered that José had revived in her another emotion she had believed to be long entombed—jealousy.

The carriage came to a stop in the first courtyard of the palace. She waited. Her maid opened the door to the carriage and removed the throw. The driver assisted her descent as her maid held open the umbrella. She stepped through the gate into the second courtyard and began to climb the steps to her apartment when she heard the thrilling opening notes of the third movement of the “Moonlight Sonata.” She paused and listened. The hands that played the piece were more practiced, confident, and experienced than José’s. Waving her maid aside, she went to the grand sala and stood at the doorway. The musician was the boy—she could scarcely bear even to think his name, much less speak it aloud—David.

She was forced to admit that he made a charming picture, his long hair falling across his face as his fingers raced across the keyboard. He had a coarse kind of broad-shouldered good looks. She could understand why her fine-boned, delicately beautiful grandson might be drawn to him on the theory of the attraction of opposites. Of course, in ten years’ time the boy’s stolid muscularity would have turned to fat and his youthful effervescence faded into loutishness; such was the second sight of old age. But for now, she closed her eyes and allowed Beethoven’s genius to quicken her pulse. When the boy reached an emphatic finish, she reflexively applauded.

He rose so quickly from the piano bench he nearly knocked it over. “Señora Marquesa, I did not know you had entered the room.”

“I love that piece,” she said and then, recovering her imperiousness, asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Your instrument is so much finer than anything we have at the conservatory that Doña Alicia gave me permission to practice on it for the competition.”

The boy, who remained standing, replied, “The Centenario competition, Señora. The winner will be given a scholarship to study at the Conservatoire de Paris for two years.”

“I do not know, Señora Marquesa,” he said. “I started playing later than many of my classmates. That is why I need to practice, night and day.”

He looked down. “My family’s means are such that we could not afford a piano, and I did not start playing until I was ten years old, at school. But, like José, many of my classmates began receiving lessons when they were five or six. I lost that time and I shall never recover it. In the end, that may be the difference between winning and losing.”

A thought turned in her mind like a key opening a locked door, but to the boy she said only, “Well, in that case you had better resume your practice.”

“I assure you,” she said, rising to go to her room, “it was no more than a passing interest, and it has passed.”

Sarmiento sat at his desk in his office reading a report about a typhoid outbreak in La Bolsa, a notorious colonia filled with flophouses and tenements. His department had imposed a quarantine, but the residents had refused to comply because it kept them from going to their jobs. The police were called in, a minor riot ensued, and three people were killed. Ultimately, the quarantine was established and the outbreak contained. The author of the report, a district inspector under Sarmiento’s supervision, referred to the three violent deaths as “collateral damage,” a masterpiece of bureaucratic dissemblance. He tipped back his chair and sighed. The poor had always resented the health department’s agents, but in the past three years, as the economy had soured, their resentment had turned into resistance. His inspectors refused to enter certain neighborhoods without a police escort. The police themselves refused to enter the worst neighborhoods, and who knew what diseases were incubating in them.

An American colleague had sent him a copy of Jacob Riis’s book How the Other Half Lives, about the tenements of New York City. It was filled with shocking descriptions and illustrated with even more shocking photographs. What was most impressive to Sarmiento, however, was that the plight of the destitute had even been deemed worthy of public exposure and discussion. He despised the Americans for their hypocrisy—defending democratic values in principle while behaving like the most retrograde colonialists—and their adolescent vulgarity. Still, he had to admit their imperfect democracy permitted, tolerated, and sometimes even rewarded scathing criticism of the status quo. A book like Riis’s was unimaginable in México, where the government regarded the Indian poor as a state secret, and the upper classes dismissed their misfortunes as the fruit of racial degeneracy.

“The government?” he muttered aloud, casting a scornful glance at his big desk covered with papers bearing the seal of the Superior Sanitation Council. “I am the government.”

He got up from his desk and walked to the window, gazing at the volcanoes that floated like mirages in the distance over the domes and towers and ochre-colored roofs of Ciudad de México. How beautiful his city was, how much he loved her, how hopeless he felt about her future.

“Sir, there is an Indian out here. He gave me this note to give you. The man cannot speak.”

Sarmiento took the note, opened it, and immediately recognized his wife’s handwriting. It implored him to come immediately to Coyoacán and to bring his medical bag and surgical tools. Sarmiento brushed past his secretary and saw Padre Cáceres’s Yaqui servant, Ramoncito, standing in the anteroom.

She had sent her carriage and had evidently instructed the driver to race back because the journey was swift and bumpy. At last, they reached their destination, a decaying mansion at the outskirts of the village. When he alighted from the carriage, she was standing at the door to meet him.

“A family property,” she said. “The rest I will explain later, but now I need for you to come with me.”

In the overgrown courtyard, a half-dozen men were smoking and sunning themselves. They were all Indian and their kinship was obvious in their skin tone and features, but they were unlike the servile Indians of the city, for these men, even at rest, were coiled and watchful, like serpents or soldiers. They followed him with hard, wary eyes.

Her response raised more questions than it answered, but he saw she was agitated and did not press her. They passed through a long room arranged like a hospital ward and into a smaller room where a man lay on a narrow, iron-framed bed, staring at the ceiling. His right leg beneath the knee was a swirl of searing red and putrid green. The air was foul with the smell of rot.

They stepped into a courtyard and sat on a stone bench beneath an ancient olive tree. She told him everything. He listened, with incredulity, then anger, and then grudging admiration at her courage and resourcefulness. When she finished he asked, “Do you have any idea of the trouble that you would bring upon yourself and our family if you are found out?”

“My rank will protect us from the harshest sanctions,” she replied. “Carmen Díaz is my friend. She would not abandon me.”

“And how long were you planning to continue this … I don’t even know what to call it. Mission?”

“For as long as the government seizes these people and sells them into bondage.”

The government, he thought. That word again. “I am the government, Alicia. I hold a public office. My commission was signed by Díaz himself.”

“I know. That is why I kept this from you as long as I could. But you are not simply some bureaucrat, Miguel. You are a humanitarian. You could never execute orders that would cause the kind of suffering we have inflicted on the Yaquis.”

He thought about the three people killed by the police to enforce his quarantine in La Bolsa. “Hard choices are sometimes required to achieve the general good,” he said softly.

“What good is accomplished by driving the Yaquis from their land, killing their women, placing their children into orphanages, and enslaving their men?”

He was quiet for a moment. “The issue is more complicated than your question,” he said. “We can discuss it after I operate. I have no anesthetic. This will not be easy.”

“I will assist you,” she said. “And Santiago—that is his name, Miguel—he is like the other Yaquis. They pride themselves on their ability to withstand pain without a murmur.”

“Well,” he said, rising and extending his hand to her. “This will put him to the test.”

He explained to the Yaqui what he needed to do. The Indian gave a curt nod, took a long drink of the brandy that Alicia had brought for him, and clamped his teeth on a gag of rope. He did not flinch at the sight of Sarmiento’s bow-framed saw. The operation was grisly but short and he made a clean cut. As he sutured the flap over the stump, he felt confident that his patient would make a good recovery. The Indian had endured the operation with scarcely a sound.

The Indian removed the gag from his mouth. “I am a warrior,” he said in a guttural croak.

“Here,” Sarmiento said, handing him the brandy. “Drink this. It will help with the pain.”

The Indian took the bottle and, before drinking, said, “I bless you and your family for saving my life.”

Afterward, as he and Alicia were driving back to the city, he said, “You were very good today.”

She sighed. “It was all I could do to keep from fainting when you handed me Santiago’s leg.”

“But you didn’t faint,” he said. “You kept your head.” He put his arm around her. “You must know that your project will be discovered. A servant will talk or the captain’s superiors will become suspicious about the missing Indians. The villagers in Coyoacán will begin to wonder about your comings and goings. Or one of your patients will escape. You cannot continue this indefinitely.”

“I have never commanded your obedience in anything,” he said. “I will not start now, but in this marriage we are not two people, Alicia, we are one. If you insist on continuing your work, I will have to resign my post. It is hypocrisy to take bread from Caesar with one hand and strike him with the other.”

“No one knows better than I how little you have been able to accomplish in your position.”

“Perhaps I have not done all I hoped,” he conceded. “But I have been able to accomplish a little and there is a little more I hope to achieve. Particularly now. Díaz wants the city to be a showplace for the Centenario and he has given us more money this year than in the past ten. I hope to use some of those funds to actually make the city a better place to live. Besides, Alicia, Don Porfirio’s time is coming to an end. Even he must see that, and accede to the demands of the people to make Madero his vice president. Then real change can begin.” After a moment’s silence, he continued. “I am asking you as your husband and your friend to give me a little longer in my work to do whatever good I still can.”

Reluctantly, she nodded. “As soon as the men are recovered and well enough to travel, I will close the house,” she said. “In the meantime, I will not take on any others. But I will find another way to help the Yaquis. I must.”

“At first, I had no reason other than my sympathy for what they have suffered,” she said. “But now that I have talked to them and learned something of their beliefs, I feel that they are … a kind of holy people.”

“The Yaquis believe God gave them their homeland. They say his angels came down from heaven and established the boundaries of their land with prayer and music. They describe a river valley at the edge of the desert that is like a paradise. In thanks, they make their lives into a constant sacrament of praise to God. When they are born, their mothers promise them to Jesus or Mary or one of the saints and they are expected to fulfill that promise by undertaking lifelong religious duties that would be onerous for anyone else. But they do it freely, gladly.” A tear ran down her face. “In their minds, Miguel, our war to take their land is a war against their faith. If they are driven off their land, they will be driven away from God.”

“My dear,” he asked softly, “don’t all combatants in wars say God is on their side?”

“The Yaquis don’t say that God is their protector in this war. They say they fight to protect God. They would allow themselves to be exterminated before they would accept defeat.”

“Yes. They will die to the last man before they surrender their homeland. They must be saved.”

“Very well, but next time, consult me,” he said. “I will help you if I can.”

José had known longing, but not loneliness, until his longing for a friend had been fulfilled by David. Only then did the hours he was alone take on the particular emptiness and weight created by the absence of the beloved. In that void, he was conscious of his solitude as he had never been before. The long galleries and empty rooms of the palace, which had been his playground, now seemed a kind of prison. School, which he had endured, was now unbearable because everywhere he looked he saw the friendships that his classmates formed and from which he was excluded. His parents seemed, more than ever, remote, benign giants who occasionally condescended to look down at him from their heights. As for his grandmother, with whom he would otherwise have filled the hours between his time with David, an estrangement had developed between them because of her dislike for his friend. Instead, he suffered those empty hours with thoughts and memories of David and anticipation at seeing him again. He imagined a future in which they would be together always, older and younger brother. They would live in the same house, where they would play piano duets and then go out and ride their bicycles and eat ice cream in the park before coming home to sleep in the same bed. When he dreamed of lying beside David, feeling his body’s warmth, inhaling his distinctive scent, listening to the timbre of his voice as they whispered confidences, a feeling stirred in the pit of his stomach. Indescribably sweet, it seeped through him as if his body was a comb filling with honey. He had no name for this sensation, but even as it thrilled him, it also frightened him with its intensity. When it passed, his loneliness for David made him weep.

Returning to the palace from school one afternoon, he was surprised to see David’s bicycle in the courtyard. It was not a lesson day nor had they made plans to see each other. Still, when he heard David’s voice coming from the sala, he ran inside to see him. There he found David sitting stiffly at the end of the settee delicately holding a cup, while his mother sat on the other end.

“Sit down, José. It’s early, but if you like you can have a cup of chocolate.”

“No, Mamá,” José said, sitting in a chair across from them. “Is everything okay?”

The Americanism puzzled her. David said, by way of explanation, “It means, ‘is everything in order?’” He looked at José. “I have good news, José.”

José nodded. David had often spoken of his desire to study in Paris. José sometimes imagined them together walking along its snowy boulevards. “Yes, but what is the good news?”

Suddenly, he understood. David was not referring to a future event but to the present. “When?” José blurted out.

“Isn’t that wonderful, José?” his mother prodded gently. “Aren’t you happy for your friend?”

“The scholarship is for two years,” David replied. “José, are you all right?”

He looked back and forth at the concerned faces of David and his mother, then jumped up and ran to his room, where he threw himself on his bed and burst into tears.

He was not aware his mother had entered his room until he felt her weight on the bed and heard her say, “José, you were very rude to our guest. That is not suitable behavior. When he comes for your lesson, I expect you to apologize and to tell him how happy you are for him. He is fortunate to have this opportunity, and he wanted to share his good fortune with you as his friend. You will be glad for him, and there will be no more scenes.”

He rolled on his back, wiped his tears with his sleeve, and said, “I do not want him to leave. I love him.”

She gazed wonderingly at him for a moment and then stroked his cheek with her palm. “Of course you love him,” she said. “He is a sweet boy, and he has been kind to you.”

The warmth of her hand and the sympathy in her voice consoled him, but there was a part of him that knew she did not understand what he had meant, but then he did not fully understand himself.

She sighed. “I know. But when you love another person you must want what makes him happy, not what makes you happy. Do you understand?”

“All love comes from God, mijo, and God wants nothing from us except that we are happy. He loves us so much that he lets us choose our own paths to happiness, even when he would have us take another path, and even when our path leads us away from him. You love David and you want him to be happy. This is the path of happiness he has chosen, and, as you love him, you must let him take it, even though it takes him to Paris.”

Later, after he had cried himself into exhaustion and fallen asleep, she kissed his tear-stained face and marveled at the extremity of this grief. She had observed that José was infatuated with the older boy, but she had thought it was merely a kind of hero worship. When José had said, “I love him,” there was a nakedness in his declaration that had taken her aback because for a moment it seemed as if he was speaking of a lover. But, of course, she told herself, José was a nine-year-old boy who was innocent of such sentiments. No, she thought, José was simply an affectionate, sensitive, and emotional child who formed deeper attachments than other boys his age. She chided herself for letting him be alone too much. It was his loneliness that accounted for the depth of his affection for David. That was her fault, and she would correct it by seeing that José became more engaged with other boys his age.

“He felt unwell and I put him to bed,” Alicia said. “By the way, Mother, do you know anything about a scholarship donated to the conservatory for David de la Torre?”

“José’s piano instructor,” she replied. “An anonymous benefactor made a gift to the conservatory to allow him to study in Paris. He thought I had made the donation and came to thank me. When I told him I was not his patroness, he thought it might be you.”

La Niña raised a thin eyebrow. “Me? How extraordinary! The only time I’ve spoken to the boy was to reproach him for entering my house with muddy boots.”

“Well, in any event, it’s a wonderful opportunity for him,” Alicia commented. Hearing voices approach the room, she said, “My sisters have arrived.”

“With better gossip than the prospects of a postal clerk’s son, I hope,” La Niña said.

Only later did it occur to Alicia to wonder how her mother knew David’s father was a postal clerk, and she meant to ask her, but the matter slipped her mind.

The Imparcial lay on Sarmiento’s desk, its front page dominated by large portraits of Don Porfirio and his newly announced choice for vice president—Ramón Corral, the former governor of the state of Sonora. “Scourge of the savage Yaquis,” the approving newspaper caption read. There was no mention of Madero, but the Imparcial, like almost all the city’s newspapers, was subsidized by the government.

“I see you have been apprised of México’s great good fortune,” Liceaga said with heavy sarcasm, entering the room. He was the picture of summer elegance in his lightweight gray suit, blindingly white shirtfront and collar, and pale blue necktie.

“No, it is all too believable,” Liceaga said, sitting on the other side of the desk. He lit a cigarette. “Corral is a corrupt, syphilitic Indian killer.” He lightly exhaled. “Thus, no one wants to see him president, and, therefore, by choosing him, Don Porfirio guarantees that no one will intrigue to put Corral in his place.”

“Madero was never a real possibility. No one with any popular support was going to be named Díaz’s successor. That’s why he sent General Reyes off to Japan, because Reyes was being promoted for vice president by the army. That’s why Limantour decided that now was a good time to visit London to renegotiate our loans with the English banks. The finance minister was being promoted by the technocrats and business interests.” He waved his cigarette like a pointer. “Anyone who wanted to be vice president was automatically suspect in Díaz’s eyes.” He stood up. “So, it’s Don Porfirio until 1914.”

“At which point he will be eighty-four years old,” Sarmiento said. “And when he dies …”

“Oh, dear boy, everyone knows that. He’s an investor in half the whorehouses of the city, and he has long enjoyed sampling the wares. Somewhere along the line, he got unlucky.”

The note came from Luis within days, delivered by his silent Indian companion, Ángel, instructing Sarmiento to meet him at a pulquería in Indianilla called Valparaiso. At the appointed hour, Sarmiento pushed past the fringe of tattered papel picado at the doorway and passed from the brilliant sunlight into the tobacco-filled, alcohol-soaked darkness of the bar. Along one side of the room was a long, chest-high bar made out of cheap planks of wood and lined with schooners. Behind it were barrels of pulque painted carnival colors—red, pink, blue, and green—to suggest a gaiety that was nowhere else evident. On the other side of the room were tables and chairs hewn from the same rough wood as the bar. On the far wall was a painted ditty he had seen before:

Do you know that pulque

Is a liquor divine?

It is drunk by angels

Instead of wine?

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw his cousin with a glass in front of him, his personal, impeccable elegance like a bright light in the alcoholic dimness. Sarmiento went and sat.

“You want a drink?” Luis asked. “The stuff they sell here is less nauseating than the rot you get everywhere else.”

Luis lifted the glass and took a sip. “I hated pulque before I met Ángel, but it’s all he drinks. I’ve grown accustomed to it.”

“How is it you and he travel together as companions without attracting attention?”

“It’s simple, Primo, I am a gentleman and he is an Indian. It is assumed he is my servant and in public that is how we treat each other. Privately …” He shrugged. “I am sure those details would not interest you.”

“I am a man like other men who love and suffer. Do I love Ángel? Yes, I love him. Do I suffer because of it? Yes. I suffer because my love for him must remain a secret and our life together enshrouded in lies.” He swigged the pulque. “Can you imagine living in a world where there is no place in the sun for you, Miguel? Only a few rat holes like this one. Oh, hadn’t you noticed? Those ladies over there? Beneath their heavy makeup are the shadows of beards. The barkeep with his gold tooth and thick neck? A woman. This is where those of my type gather, along with whores and thieves.” He smiled grimly. “The Valley of Paradise.”

Sarmiento cast his glance discreetly around the room and what had at first appeared a typical haunt of the sodden poor assumed a strange and furtive aspect.

“I think I will have that drink,” Miguel replied and signaled to the barkeep. When he—she—brought the glass to the table, Sarmiento detected the wrappings beneath her shirt that bound her breasts, but even the loose trousers she wore could not conceal her womanly hips.

“These men who dress like women,” he said softly to his cousin, “and this woman who dresses like a man. Your friend Carpenter claims that they represent only a small percentage of homosexuals.”

“That is true,” Luis said, “but without them, the rest of us would not know how to find each other. They are the red lights of the whorehouse, the cross on the church, the symbol of welcome.” He lifted his glass. “Our beacons.” He drank. “This is not why I asked you here. I assume you know about Corral.”

“Madero anticipated something like this,” Luis said. “He will now drop the pretense that he was interested only in being Díaz’s vice president and announce he is a candidate for the presidency.”

“Yes, of course,” Luis said impatiently. “He also knows that he will eventually be arrested, as will all the rest of us who are working for him. That will become the precipitating event.”

“A revolution,” Luis replied. He lifted his glass and drank. “Everywhere he goes, we gather the local leaders of the disaffected. We tell them to be prepared to lead their followers into the street when the moment comes.”

“That would have been true once,” Luis replied. “But Don Porfirio knows only too well from his own coup that a powerful military is a threat to his security. For the last twenty years he has reduced the size of the army, decentralized its command, and paid the troops next to nothing. As a result, it is completely unprepared to stop a well-organized, well-armed rebel force.”

“Do not underestimate him,” Luis said sharply. “He is a man of great personal courage, and while you may think that his talk about the spirit world is claptrap, it has given him an unassailable confidence in his mission.” He looked at Sarmiento closely for a moment and then asked, “Will you be with us with the time comes, Miguel?”

“Until Don Porfirio, the history of México was a history of rebellions, invasions, civil wars, and insurrections,” he said. “Is that you want to return to, Luis? Chaos? Destruction? Death?”

“But what, Miguel? Díaz will rig the election to secure his reelection, and we will have four more years of autocracy.”

“Díaz will die, but not the machinery of dictatorship. Another strongman will take over, but younger than Díaz, more energetic, and more ruthless. The moment to act is at hand.”

“I am asking you to commit yourself to justice,” Luis said. “When the time comes,” he emphasized. “Not today or tomorrow. Not next month, but soon.”