First night attack on Kino's house
The first night attack on Kino's house is the event that transforms the great pearl from a symbol of hope into a magnet for violence, shattering the family's fragile security and setting Kino on a path of escalating paranoia and bloodshed. Occurring on the same night the doctor treated Coyotito, the attack reveals that the pearl has already drawn the predatory attention of the town, and it forces both Kino and Juana to confront the evil it has awakened.
The Intrusion and Kino's Response
After the doctor's departure, Kino, suspicious and afraid, had moved the pearl from its first hiding place by the side post to a new hole beneath his sleeping mat. He lay in the darkness, his brain burning, his ears alert. From the corner of the house came a sound so soft it might have been a thought—a little furtive movement, a touch of a foot on earth, the almost inaudible purr of controlled breathing. Kino held his breath to listen, and he knew that whatever dark thing was in his house was holding its breath too. Juana's hand crept over to him in warning, and then the sound came again: the whisper of a foot on dry earth and the scratch of fingers in the soil. A wild fear surged in Kino's breast, and on the fear came rage, as it always did. His hand crept into his breast where his knife hung on a string, and then he sprang like an angry cat, leaping, striking, and spitting for the dark thing he knew was in the corner. He felt cloth, struck at it with his knife and missed, struck again and felt his knife go through cloth, and then his head crashed with lightning and exploded with pain. There was a soft scurry in the doorway, and running steps for a moment, and then silence.
Aftermath and Juana's Plea
Kino could feel warm blood running from his forehead, and he could hear Juana calling to him in terror. He groped his way back to the sleeping mat. Juana worked quickly at the fire, uncovering an ember and blowing a little flame into shreds of cornhusk so that a tiny light danced through the hut. From a secret place she brought a little piece of consecrated candle and lighted it. She dipped the end of her head shawl in water and swabbed the blood from Kino's bruised forehead. "It is nothing," Kino said, but his eyes and his voice were hard and cold, and a brooding hate was growing in him. Now the tension which had been growing in Juana boiled up to the surface. "This thing is evil," she cried harshly. "This pearl is like a sin! It will destroy us." Her voice rose shrilly. "Throw it away, Kino. Let us break it between stones. Let us bury it and forget the place. Let us throw it back into the sea. It has brought evil. Kino, my husband, it will destroy us." In the firelight her lips and her eyes were alive with her fear.
Kino's Refusal and Hardening
But Kino's face was set, and his mind and his will were set. "This is our one chance," he said. "Our son must go to school. He must break out of the pot that holds us in." Juana cried that it would destroy them all, even their son. Kino hushed her, saying that in the morning they would sell the pearl and then the evil would be gone. For the first time he knew that his knife was still in his hands, and he raised the blade and looked at it and saw a little line of blood on the steel. For a moment he seemed about to wipe the blade on his trousers, but then he plunged the knife into the earth and so cleansed it. The attack had not only wounded him physically; it had driven a wedge between husband and wife. Juana saw the pearl as a sin that must be cast out, while Kino, his will hardened, saw it as the only means to a future for his son. The event marks the point of no return: the family's old life of safety and warmth is gone, replaced by a state of siege. Kino's later dream, in which he saw in the pearl's surface a huddled dark body on the ground with shining blood dripping from its throat, confirms that the violence of this night has become inseparable from the pearl itself.
