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“¡Tu que sabes!” he said to her. “What do you know? The chaneques don’t really bother people very much, and as for the demons, all the world knows that they never show themselves in the light of day! At night, well, their powers are stronger, yes, in the hours of darkness they have certain powers, but not strong enough to interfere with a Christian! Not even with one of God’s poorest servants! You know nothing of these things!”
    All the same, she said, and be that as it may, Ektún was a place of evil gloom, and so was Yaxchilán, and Piedras Negras too, come to that, all those old abandoned cities of the antiguos along the river banks, and you couldn’t pay her enough money to sleep for one night around those old stones.
    Sula was Mayan herself, of the Chontal group, with heavy-lidded eyes and hook nose and receding chin. I had seen her face on a mossy stela at the Copán ruin, carved in stone a thousand years ago. She was one of the few Indians I had ever heard express strong feelings about such matters. The ones I knew—uprooted city dwellers for the most part, admittedly—showed little interest in the monuments of their ancestors. They neither feared nor venerated the templos of the old ones.
    The Servel didn’t make it to fifty at the given time, or even to fifty-five, but the door gasket was bad, I pointed out, and once Manolo had replaced it, the box would surely do the job. It would last for years too. Refugio wrote “$75” on his palm and showed it to me.
    â€œThat wouldn’t even pay for my gasoline.”
    But I gave in and settled for a hundred. He agreed it was a good buy.
    We stayed up late in the office talking about the old days, and one thing and another. Refugio fed tidbits to Ramos. He asked me to be on the lookout for a Tecumseh gasoline engine with a horizontal shaft, of about eight horsepower, and some of those little German cigarette-rolling machines that you used to be able to find in Veracruz. He asked me if I thought he needed one of those new water beds. “No.” Motorized golf cart? “No.” Food blender? “Yes, to make licuados . Milkshakes.” Trash compactor? “No.” It would take one the size of a house to compact his trash. He showed me an advertisement for elevator shoes in an American magazine. Could I get him a pair? One of the shoes was pictured, a brown loafer, which promised to give you an invisible three-inch lift above your fellow men.
    â€œThree inches,” he said. “How much?”
    I showed him with thumb and finger. “Like that. About eight centimeters.”
    He studied the deceptive shoe with a dreamy smile. Three inches was a little more than he had thought.

I SLEPT ON the couch and was off early. I had breakfast as I drove. Sula had left me a sack of hard-boiled eggs, already peeled, and four buttered slices of Bimbo bread, some salt in a twist of paper, and a single habanero pepper pod, the world’s hottest. Bimbo is like Wonder bread, or light bread, as we called it in Caddo Parish. I had told her many times that I preferred corn tortillas, but she took that to be a polite gesture or an affectation. She knew the yanquis likes their bread finely spun from bleached wheat flour. Sula felt sorry for me because I had no wife to look after me.
    The washboard gravel ended just beyond Refugio’s place. No more maintenance. From here on the road was just a rough slash across the hilly Chiapas rain forest. The drive had once been a shady one all the way, under the jungle canopy. Now there were cleared pastures with stumps where cattle ranchers had moved in. I met a log truck and saw a Pemex crew at work with their seismic gear, sounding the earth for pockets of oil. Here and there I passed a hut made of sticks and thatch, where a solitary farmer had squatted. This was his finca . It was more like camping out than farming.
    The road, at this time, ended at the ruins of