Villaviciosa is a modest town of low adobe houses and small front yards, with two bars, a grocery store, and mountains to the east. In the novel it is not merely a rural waypoint: it is where Pedro Negrete recruits Olegario Cura Exposito for work in Santa Teresa, beginning the young man’s passage from a local life into the city’s police world.

Setting and Approach

When Negrete returns to Villaviciosa to find a trustworthy young man for his old friend Pedro Rengifo, he recognizes the town as unchanged since his previous visit. Its scale is intimate: a few houses, two bars, one grocery store. Beyond it, the foothills seem to shrink or grow as the sun and shadows move, making the landscape itself appear to alter without the town changing.

Negrete questions several young men about whether they can shoot, whether they can be relied upon, and whether they want to earn money. He chooses the youngest. Epifanio, whom Negrete consults privately, is cautious: the boy seems suitable, but there is no certainty. The recruitment is thus framed less as a formal appointment than as a judgment made in a familiar place, among people who know how to size one another up.

The Bar and the Departure

After making his choice, Negrete accepts drinks from two elderly local men. They drink salty pulque and large glasses of water, and talk about goats lost in the Blue Hills and holes in the mountains. Their conversation gives the recruitment an unceremonious local setting: the boy is called over during a pause and told he has been chosen. One of the old men tells him to say goodbye to his mother. The boy looks at Negrete, then at the floor, but changes his mind and leaves without answering.

When Negrete comes out of the bar, the boy is already beside Epifanio, leaning against the car and talking. He then takes the back seat while Epifanio drives. The route out of town marks the transition directly: the dirt streets of Villaviciosa fall behind, and the three men continue across the desert toward Santa Teresa. Asked his name, the boy gives the full form, Olegario Cura Exposito. Later, when asked what his friends call him, he answers, Lalo.

The Road to Santa Teresa

The departure is punctuated by a small, darkly comic roadside episode. Epifanio hits an animal and gets out to inspect it; after a gunshot, he tells the others he has killed a wolf. Negrete corrects him, measuring the dead animal by its length and weight and identifying it as a coyote. Epifanio speculates that it may have been blind, then imagines that it was a female seeking a safe place to give birth. The explanation does not satisfy him, and the animal is left beside the road.

The scene binds Villaviciosa’s departure to the desert’s uncertainty. The radio cannot pick up a Santa Teresa station and yields only static; the three fall silent as the first lights of the city appear at El Altillo. Negrete repeats the boy’s name, asks about his nickname, and turns Lalo Cura into a pun on la locura, or madness. Negrete and Epifanio laugh, and soon the boy joins them. The name acquired on the road carries the town’s recruit into Santa Teresa, where the journey’s mixture of violence, misrecognition, and laughter has already begun.

Narrative Significance

Villaviciosa’s brief appearance concentrates a larger movement into a few concrete details: the old men’s pulque, the boy’s unspoken departure, the car leaving the dirt streets, the dead coyote, and the failed radio signal. The town is presented as stable and legible, while the road beyond it becomes uncertain. Its narrative importance lies in that threshold: a recruitment made through personal scrutiny sends Lalo Cura toward Santa Teresa, and the desert journey supplies the first incident through which his new identity is named.