hen the wind was right in the lower part of the city, the fart-like smell of cooked broccoli and cauliflower from the plants would waft through the streets that ran in front of the houses, and along the railroad tracks that ran along the backs. The reek would enter the cheaply furnished parlors and the bedrooms jammed with beds and the kitchens so cramped you could not spread your arms wide without knocking something off the stove or the sink. Sometimes people would close their windows. But mostly not. They were used to the smell, even welcomed it. It was the smell of good jobs.

San Pedro, in the province of Ixtajuanato, was situated in a large valley of clayish soils made productive only through the wells that pierced to the water table below. Where there was irrigation, the soil turned dark and tillable. It yielded rich vegetable crops that made their way to the processing plants and ended up on frozen food shelves in faraway markets. It brought in foreign investment that translated into ever more industry. But the valley was a patchwork, for water was dear. Many a farmer in the valley, semi-peasant still, scrambled to put in his one crop of corn during the brief rainy season. He ploughed every inch of his land, up to the very bases of the thorny mesquites that grew where his fields met the road. After the harvest in September and during the long dry months that followed, the fields would lie fallow and the soil, having nothing to fix it, would dry to a restless dust. When the strong winds came in April and May, it would be caught up in towering columns of debris that whirled ferociously across the uncertain landscape.

The reek of the plants did not reach up to the heights of Villas of Loma Alta, where Arturo Caudillo had his office at the Technical Institute of San Pedro. Caudillo was a respected man, and it felt good. It felt good to be part of the “Tech,” whose graduates –agronomists, industrial engineers, accountants, business administrators – were the recognized elite of the valley. It felt good to be in his second year there as director of university studies. And that before his forty-six birthday. It felt good be respected by his colleagues. And in larger circles too.

Every morning when he arrived at work, Caudillo's first act was to stand briefly in the doorway and sweep his eyes over his Wall. Arranged on that side of his office were his diplomas, award plaques, and framed photos of himself at important events. Two of the latter showed him sitting at the presenters' table of the fifth and the sixth annual conferences, respectively, on Attracting Sustainable Foreign Industry to Ixtajuanato. The smaller photo was from the earlier conference. He was positioned four seats down from the governor of the province. The larger was the more recent. It showed him seated on the governor's left but one.

"Life is good," Caudillo would comment to his wife. In the middle of the Wall was a window. The window looked out on the brilliant green of the campus lawn. It looked out on beds that bloomed with roses of red and white and yellow and pink. It looked out on bougainvilleas and on fruit trees: on lemon and mandarin orange trees, with their shiny leaves and citrus scent, and on the big-leaved fig, not much of an attention getter during most of the year, but in late summer its fruit dripped lusciously down the eater's chin.

In an arid province, the Tech was a Garden of Eden.

Obscuring part of the view out Caudillo's window was a fig tree. It attracted birds during the fruit season. "I couldn't tell you what's outside my window if my life depended on it," Caudillo had been heard to say.

In his office one day a student noticed an unusual song. "What bird is that?"

"It's a bird," said Caudillo.

Despite his pressing duties, Caudillo kept his hand in teaching. Once a year he offered his Advanced Seminar in Industrial Processes. It was one of the most popular courses on campus. Caudillo knew he had a way with his students. A rapport. The students formed eager groups outside his door during office hours. The rare times he ate in the school cafeteria, they would drift over to his table until he ended up the center of a group. One measure of his popularity was the gift his students chipped in to buy for him at the close of each course. He had noticed they tended to become more extravagant each year. These were wealthy kids, with ambition.

Of course you had to know how to handle them. The right amount of information mixed in with the right amount of entertainment. It was a matter of handling them.

On the morning after the twelfth birthday of his youngest son, Guillermo, Caudillo arrived at work, focused as usual on the busy day ahead, but with an underlying unease. "Guille" seemed to be going through some kind of a stage. He would pick some trivial matter on which to ask insistent questions of his father, and then turn away in anger, all red in the face, whatever the answer.

"Was I like that at his age?" Caudillo mused. But no. He was sure he hadn't been. "So he doesn't get it from me. And it can't be from his mother either."

Caudillo found his wife an agreeable woman.

Caudillo thought about his wife's brother, a teacher in the public school system. He was always agonizing about one thing or another. One day it was the outmoded textbooks he was forced to teach with. The next day it was the venality of the director of the primary school where he taught.

"Why does your brother have to take things so seriously?" he would complain to his wife, irritated.

The chain of thought was uncomfortable. Caudillo put aside thoughts of his son and reached for some papers he needed for an upcoming meeting.

A few minutes before two o'clock his secretary buzzed him, and the unease came flooding back. His wife had arrived to drop off Guillermo. The plan was for a father and son afternoon. Next year, Guille was going to enter the university's own school system, which started in middle school. The two of them would eat dinner at the Tech cafeteria, and then Caudillo would show his son around campus. At four o’clock he had a short meeting, but he had asked Rafa Morales if Guillermo could drop in on his environmental science class. He had heard good things about the man’s teaching.

“And Guille likes science,” Caudillo said to himself.

Guillermo entered his father’s office holding his new book. It was called The Marvelous Universe. It was from Uncle Beto, and it had been the best present of all. On the cover was a picture of the Horse Head Nebula. And it really did look like a horse head! The horse head was really just a cloud of dust that had drifted in front of the Orion Nebula. That was the part behind it that glowed orange and red. The Orion Nebula was a star factory. Its raw material was the dust and gas of interstellar space. Guillermo’s mind lingered on the flavor of the words: dust of interste-e-e-e-llar space.

Guillermo had already read through a third of the book.

His father was ready to go. “Let’s go son. The cafeteria gets crowded.”

“Dad, I want to show you my book. Did you know a nebula is a star factory?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it is. But let’s get going.”

“But I want to show it to you.”

“You can show it to me in the cafeteria.”

But there was no chance in the cafeteria. Seeing Caudillo, his students began to drift over. Caudillo found himself busy introducing his son, and was pleased to see his students make much of him.

Guillermo had placed his book beside his plate, with the cover up. Nobody asked him about it.

“Come on, let’s look around,” said Caudillo afterwards. So they went to see the library and the gym and the campus swimming pool and the computer lab. At the library, Guillermo asked the librarian if there were any books on space, but she said “I don’t think so.”

“That’s not one of the fields of study here,” Caudillo reminded his son.

At the computer lab, Guillermo wanted to know if he could log on to the Internet to look for Web sites about space.

“You have Internet at home,” said his father. “Come on, we’re going to go visit a science class. Professor Morales is a great teacher. I have a meeting now, but I’ll be back for you.”

They ran into Morales going into class, and Caudillo left the two together. As he walked away he heard Morales saying to Guillermo, “So, your father tells me you like science.”

Returning an hour later, Caudillo found his son and Morales in conversation outside the classroom door. Morales turned toward Caudillo.

“I had to throw out my lesson plan because of your son,” he said with a laugh. We were going to talk about water conservation, but we ended up talking about star dust and how nuclear fusion works. I’m afraid he showed me up in front of my class. Physics was never my strong suit.”

Caudillo could tell Morales was embarrassed. Caudillo was embarrassed too, but said nothing.

Walking back with his father, Guillermo’s feet barely touched the ground. Even Professor Morales had said he had learned something new! He, Guillermo, had shown his book to the class and talked about it. About how our Sun was created out of light years of dust and gas pulled into a ball by gravity. When the temperature inside reached about 15 million degrees then nuclear fusion started. Well, first something called plasma was formed from … he had had to look for the page in his book to tell them about that one, because he couldn’t remember whether it was from protons or electrons … but after the plasma was formed everything in it started to crash and stick together, and that was called fusion. And that’s what made the Sun and all the stars glow.

At first, when he had walked into the class beside Professor Morales, it felt so strange. Being in a class with older kids. They all turned and stared at him. He had tried to look like it was nothing. After the class began, Professor Morales started telling them about how the earth was the water planet and seventy percent of it was covered by water, and that the human body is two thirds water. He had said nothing on Earth could exist without water. That was when he, Guillermo, had raised his hand to tell them that water and everything else on earth was made of star dust. And Professor Morales had asked him, Guillermo, to explain …

Going to school at the Tech next year wasn’t going to be so bad.

His Dad was talking.

“… should have known better.”

“… mortified me.

“What?”

“Your job is to let the teacher do his job. Not to try and show him up. Professor Morales deserves your respect.

“But Daddy, I wasn’t trying to show him up. I just wanted to talk about my book.”

“There is a time and a place for everything. And that was not it.”

His son was silent. Caudillo looked at the boy’s face. He sighed. Here we go again.

“Son, try and understand. I’m telling you this for your own good. There are rules in life. You have to learn to play by them. It will make life will easier for you.”

Guillermo did not reply. Around him the green campus on the hill seemed to shimmer like a mirage. There was a dryness to the air. A long plume of dust blew up from the valley below. A great nameless weight bore down upon him, as if it meant to crush him to the parched and arid earth.