"Cipriano."
"Cipriano's only a boy."
"He plays well."
"Do you know who taught him?"
"Alberto," said Manuel.
"How time passes," said Raul.
He and Manuel found cowboys struggling with a bull, outside the main corral, the bull flat in the mud near a watering trough, three lariats on him. While mounted cowboys kept the lariats tight, a veterinarian stuck a hypodermic needle in the animal. The bull bellowed. At a signal, the lariats went limp and the bull struggled to his feet and made off.
The veterinarian, a small man wearing a five-gallon hat, explained the bull's serious condition to Raul, emptying his hypodermic as he talked.
He had been trained in northern France and had ideas and methods of treatment frowned upon by most hacendados. Raul welcomed his care, for under his supervision Petaca cattle losses had decreased 20 per cent.
In the dying light the volcano had a greenish mist over it and, with no smoke coming out of the crater, expressed indolence: it said men will dawdle in hammocks and rest on petates, that fruit will have time to ripen, that birds will be able to build their nests wherever they want to, that animals will find cool hideouts to escape the summer heat ... nothing will change, only the clouds, the flying things, maybe a fish, nothing more.