The smallpox catastrophe at Latsei

The smallpox catastrophe at Latsei turns a village epidemic into a lasting moral wound. As the disease spreads and the inhabitants die, Juan’s hope of gaining wealth and status keeps him there; Bando’s attempt to escape an attacking crowd ends at the cliffs. In retrospect, the episode is also framed by an uneasy distinction between causing harm and carrying responsibility for it: Teszin’s search brought the villagers into contact with a virus latent in both men, but Juan later insists that this did not make the catastrophe her fault.

The outbreak and its warning signs

The crisis first becomes unmistakable when Juan enters the chief’s room and finds Teszin tending him. The chief is gravely ill, and Bando is there behind her. Juan draws Bando away to the shop, but treats the illness as secondary to his own immediate plan: he tells Bando that he will soon need the gold and silver they had discussed. Bando returns to his tools, while Juan leaves with a promise to check on him later.

Bando works through the day and late into the night, interrupted only when Teszin brings food. Meanwhile, the illness spreads: three more villagers fall sick, and by the next morning they have developed the same symptoms as the chief. When the chief calls for Juan and Bando, his condition has worsened. His dying words include an offer that Juan take his life and leave the others, but he cannot finish the plea. Juan supports the chief’s head and remains with him until he dies; afterward, he folds the man’s arms across his chest and straightens his robe. The village is silent as Juan returns to Bando’s workshop.

Juan recognizes the disease from an earlier epidemic in Samarkand. He remembers it reducing a population of about three thousand to roughly two hundred survivors, many of them children, and recalls that no one over thirty-five survived. This knowledge gives him reason to fear infection and to consider leaving Latsei. Yet Bando’s work is producing valuable pieces. Juan examines a palm-sized gold medallion and decides that the pieces are worth another day’s risk. He returns to his camp and sketches the buildings and cliffs, even as he imagines leaving before the disease reaches him.

Gold, delay, and the growing toll

Bando continues working late into the night, apparently unaware of how quickly the village is emptying. In the morning, he finds seven bodies laid out near his shop. Juan has watched Teszin and two young men carry out the dead, but remains at his camp with his sketchpad. The epidemic is no longer an approaching danger: its losses are visible beside the workshop where Juan’s wealth is being made.

The contrast sharpens as more bodies accumulate. By sunset, five additional dead have been laid beside the others, and cries of grief sound throughout the village. Juan listens, thinking that he has travelled too far and too often not to claim the wealth he has pursued. He has spent two hundred and fifty years trying to equal the other members of his circle in wisdom, refinement, and culture, but has never been able to match their riches. At gatherings, others boast of towers, estates, and land; when asked about his own fortunes, Juan claims to be saving to expand his estate, though he knows the claim is false and that the others know it too. He has sometimes delayed his Ascensions until he is nineteen or twenty because he dreads their unspoken judgment. The gold at Latsei promises to end that humiliation and give him the pride he has long lacked.

At dawn, about fifteen adults, roughly half women and half men, approach Bando’s door as a cohesive group; some carry clubs. Teszin is not among them. Juan draws his sword and moves toward the crowd, calculating whether he can frighten them off or whether intervening will lead to Bando’s death. He is close to the wealth he has waited centuries to acquire, and the prospect of losing it competes with the danger to Bando. The attack begins inside the shop. Bando emerges struggling against two men, breaks free, and falls before the crowd. They strike and kick him as he calls for Teszin. Juan runs toward them and shouts; the attackers turn toward him, giving Bando a chance to crawl away and get to his feet. When the crowd pursues Bando toward the cliffs, Juan stops at the open doorway rather than following immediately. Inside, he sees the finished pieces piled on the workbench, more numerous and heavier than he had dared expect.

Bando’s death and Juan’s choice

Juan calls for Bando to meet him by the horses so they can leave. Instead of joining the pursuit, he searches the bodies outside the shop for rope and jewelry. He uses the rope to enlarge the capacity of his bags, then removes bracelets, a necklace, and a gold collar from the dead. The people’s deaths and Bando’s flight have become the setting for Juan’s attempt to secure the wealth that he believes will change his standing among the others.

Teszin’s scream draws Juan’s attention to the cliffs. Bando stands at the edge of a bluff, his clothes torn and blood visible on him, while Teszin calls to him. He does not answer her. He looks down at Juan, who is still holding a large silver necklace partly draped around an older woman’s body. Juan asks whether Bando is ready. Bando closes his eyes and falls forward from the bluff. For an instant, Juan perceives him as seeming to remain aloft; Teszin’s cry carries beyond the moment of impact. The episode ends with Bando dead and Juan still below, amid the bodies and the valuables he has taken.

Responsibility and retrospective meaning

The catastrophe’s consequences persist beyond the scene. In a later conversation, Juan explains that Teszin has been hostile to him since her return and that he understands part of the reason: his conduct on the final day at Latsei. He identifies another source of her distress as her belief that she was responsible for the villagers’ deaths because she went looking for them and exposed them to the smallpox virus latent in both her body and Juan’s. He does not call this her fault. Instead, he distinguishes fault from responsibility: the deaths would not have happened in the same way without her actions, and he says that this responsibility remains hers to carry. His own transgression, he adds, was witnessing hers.

That distinction does not undo the choices that define the episode. Juan knows what the disease can do, sees the toll mounting, and nevertheless stays because the gold offers him a chance to overcome the shame he has carried among his peers. Bando’s death comes as the epidemic has already shattered the village and Juan has made his priorities plain. The later account complicates blame without erasing consequence: Teszin’s responsibility is bound to the villagers’ exposure, while Juan’s is bound to what he chose to value and do as the catastrophe unfolded.