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goodbye to his loved ones and set off without a qualm, leaving his wife in charge of the children and the work in the fields. She directed those activities better than he, since several generations of experience flowed in her veins. The only time that he had gone to town with the money from the harvest to buy clothing and provisions for the year, he got drunk and was robbed of it all. For months there was no sugar on the Ranquileo table, and no one had new shoes; this was the source of his confidence in relegating the business affairs to his wife. She also preferred it that way. From the beginning of her married life, the responsibility for the family and farm chores had fallen on her shoulders. It was normal to see her bent over the trough or following the plow in the furrow, surrounded by a swarm of children of various ages clinging to her skirts. When Pradelio grew up, she had thought he might help her with the hard work, but at fifteen her son was the tallest and most strapping youth ever seen in those parts, and it had seemed natural to everyone that after serving his time in the military he would join the police.
    When the first rains began to fall, Digna Ranquileo moved her chair to the little gallery and settled herself there to keep an eye on the bend of the road. Her hands never rested, occupied with weaving a basket of wicker or altering the children’s clothes, but her watchful eyes wandered from time to time to glance down the lane. Soon, any day now, the tiny figure of Hipólito would appear carrying his cardboard suitcase. There he was, the same as in her longing, finally materializing, nearer and nearer, with steps that had grown slower with the years, but always tender and joking. Digna’s heart gave a leap, as it had the first time she saw him in the ticket window of a traveling circus many years ago, wearing a threadbare green-and-gold uniform and with a zealot’s expression in his dark eyes, hustling the crowd to step right this way, don’t miss the show. In those days he had a pleasant face, before it had been plastered over with the mask of a clown. His wife was never able to welcome him naturally. An adolescent passion squeezed her chest and she wanted to run to him and throw her arms around his neck to hide her tears, but months of separation had aggravated her shyness and she greeted him with restraint, eyes lowered, blushing. Her man was there, he had returned, everything would be different for a time, because he took great pains to make up for his absence. In the following months, she would invoke the charitable spirits in her Bible to prolong the rain and immobilize the calendar in a winter without end.
    In contrast, the return of their father was a minor event for the children. One day when they came home from school or from work in the fields, they would find him sitting in a wicker chair beside the door, his maté in hand, blending into the drab autumn landscape as if he had never been away from those fields, from that house, from those vines with their clusters of grapes drying on the pruned vines, from the dogs stretched out on the patio. The children would note their mother’s worried and impatient eyes, her briskness as she waited on her husband, her apprehension as she watched over those meetings to fend off any impertinence. Honor your father, the Old Testament said; the father is the pillar of the family. And that was why they were forbidden to call him Bosco the Clown, or to talk about his work; don’t ask questions, wait till he feels like telling you. When they were little—when Hipólito was shot from a cannon from one end of the tent to the other, landing in a net amid the reverberation of gunpowder and flashing an uneasy smile—and once they had survived their fright, the children could feel proud of him, because there he soared like a hawk. Later, though, Digna did not allow them to go to the circus to see their father declining in pitiful