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desperate. These places that people are always leaving to become maids and janitors in the States, I imagine them to be awful. But no, the places look fine. It’s the people’s lives that are awful.”
    All that Steadman said was “That bastard Nestor told us he’d leave a message.”
    But he said it casually and without rancor, for the sex had calmed him, had eased his mind and pleasantly wearied him and made him accepting.
    They went for a walk to Old Town, down the main street that led from the hotel. On the way, seeing a hat shop, Steadman impulsively went in and tried some on.
    â€œAll from Montecristi. The best ones. Is the Optimo estyle,” the saleswoman said, offering others. “We call these thee Natural. Look, thee weebing. So many months it takes to weeb one. You like?”
    Steadman bought himself a Panama with a wide brim, and left the shop wearing it, walking self-consciously because of the hat. They saw more Todos los Santos processions, looking like Halloween kids, one small girl wearing the same mask—black satin trimmed with black lace—that Ava had worn when naked, making love. Steadman could not help attaching sexuality to the masked people, even the skinny-legged girls, whom he saw as teasing, even provocative.
    As they approached the narrower roads of Old Town, the sky lowered and contracted with dark clouds. A rumble of thunder brought a torrent of rain. They ducked under a flat-roofed shelter at a bus stop and watched as hailstones, bright white and as round as mothballs, clattered onto the soaked cobbles of the road.
    Then the rain eased. They resumed walking and were obstructed on the sidewalk by a small pretty Indian child, red-cheeked in the cold. No more than three or four years old, she sat in the middle of the wet sidewalk holding a plastic cup—and could not possibly have known what she was doing, though this was likely to be her life’s work. An old woman across the road, probably Granny, eyed the little girl while begging herself, with two other children. There were ragged children all over Old Town, selling candy and bunches of flowers and combs and matches, assisting at stalls selling fruit, sweeping with clumsy-looking bunches of twigs that served as brooms. Medieval in its crude simplicity and desperation, this scene was repeated on other narrow streets, and some children carrying heavy loads in their tiny hands seemed like dwarf laborers in a cruel folktale.
    At the edge of a large plaza, Steadman saw an elderly priest walking just ahead of an Indian man. The Indian, in a blue smock and bowl haircut, with a round face and bandy legs, looked like a big simple-minded child, except that he was doggedly carrying a bag on his shoulder, and the lovely leather bag could only have belonged to the priest. The Indian belonged to the priest, too. He had been domesticated and made to submit. Steadman looked at the clean hem of the priest’s white cassock and his shiny shoes, at the Indian’s stained smock and cracked sandals. The upright priest, the bent-over Indian: in their progress across the old paving stones of the plaza they seemed to represent the history of South America, if not the history of the world.
    To Steadman all religious people looked like savages. Some of them were timid and innocent, most of them were arrogant, menacing in being so credulous and assured—the apes of an imaginary god, tyrannical simpletons who had invented that god and used the god’s denunciations as weapons in their tyranny.
    Among all these churches, Steadman reflected that he had no religious belief. The sight of believers aroused his pity but could also make him angry or sad, depending on the circumstances. Often he felt resentment that his skepticism could still shock people. His undogmatic sense of the spiritual was limited to preserving forests, nesting places for birds, shade for animals, roots keeping water pure. The symbol of his belief was