The First Communion

…and you, Juan Prieto, he said to me, how is your stud bull, the one that he himself had said prayers for against the plague so that the worms would fall from its ears, and you, Matilde Peralta, let's see what you'll give me for returning your fugitive husband in one piece. Here he is, dragged by the scruff of the neck with a rope and personally warned by him that he would rot in the Chinese pillory the next time he should try to leave his legitimate wife, and in the style of the local government he had ordered a butcher to cut off the hands of a prodigal treasurer in a public spectacle, and he picked tomatoes from a private vegetable garden and ate them with the airs of a connoisseur in front of his agronomists, commenting that the land needed the shit of a he-mule…

The Autumn of the Patriarch