The Capital
- A neatly-dressed lieutenant returns to the station with squad of ragged police, asks where the chief is, but gets no answer. He turns to dolling out punishments to prisoners—fines to some, cleaning out bathrooms and cells (yuck!) to others.
- Think we'd prefer the former.
- The police chief enters, complaining of a toothache and of a fugitive priest the Governor is upset about.
- The chief shows the lieutenant an old picture of the priest at a First Communion party, looking happy, safe, and respected—a recipient of all the good things in life. The lieutenant is none too pleased. He's never met him, but he totally hates this priest and what he symbolizes. Houston, I think we've got our primary antagonist!
- The lieutenant and the chief discuss what's known about the priest's movements: that he tried to escape on a boat, but missed it by chance. That he'd slipped through the net of the Red Shirts—a group set up to purge Mexico of the Catholic religion. Also that his parish was in Concepción, that he was born in Carmen, and that he can pass for a gringo (a foreign English speaker).
- Their conversation turns to a wanted bank robber and murderer out of America named James Calver who might seek to hide in their area.
- The lieutenant argues that the priest does more harm than the murderous thief. He proposes to the chief a means of catching the fugitive cleric: taking a hostage from every village in the state and killing the hostage if the villagers don't report the priest if he comes.
- The chief likes the idea.
- The lieutenant returns home, infuriated that people still believe in God. His certainty lies elsewhere: in a dying universe without purpose. He despises those who cannot face this reality.
- Even more, he hates the whole network of religion, which he believes is run by careerist hypocrites who live well by spreading deceits.
- The scene switches to a mother reading a smuggled story about a martyr to her two daughters—six and ten—and her son of fourteen. The girls are engrossed in the pious tale of a boy named Juan, but the boy is irritated. Juan is a little too perfect to believe.
- The boy asks his mother if Juan is a saint. His mother answers that he will be one day, along with the other martyrs. The boy then asks about Padre José, who has apparently told him that he's more a martyr than the rest.
- The mother chastises him for mentioning the despicable "traitor to God," as she calls the Padre José. He asks instead whether the priest who came to see them is like Juan. She says "No," but clarifies that he's not despicable like Padre José. The youngest girl says the priest smelt funny.
- After the story has ended and the children are out of earshot, the mother tells her husband that she's worried about the boy because saintliness doesn't interest him like it does the girls. She's also upset because he asks questions about the whisky priest, whom they hid.
- The husband surmises that if they hadn't hid the priest, he'd have been captured and shot, and she'd be reading a sanitized story about him to the children. She thinks this is silly.
- The scene concludes with the husband saying that the Church is Padre José and the whisky priest, and if they don't like it, then they must leave it. The wife says she would rather die. The husband concurs, but says they have to go on living as best they can.
- In the final scene of the chapter, Padre José, an old priest who had forsaken the priesthood and married so he wouldn't be killed, looks at the stars. He's called to bed by his wife. As he's leaving the patio for the bedroom, several children across the way mimic his wife's plea, mocking his weakness and his shame.