The Man God Forgot

Cipriano Salas is a patient man. He farms a small plot under the volcano in San Bartolo, Puebla. His neighbours wake him in the night to turn a calf. He would rather pay for a broken bottle than throw a punch. He married the sharpest girl in the village, and they have lost two children. In 1912 the hacienda takes the village's water, and Cipriano goes to fight with Zapata's men. In April 1914 he comes home on leave and learns that a federal detachment has been to his house. He buries Remedios with his own hands. Then he and his brother go looking for the twelve men who did it. After the war no town will have him. So he walks into the empty dry country and founds a town of his own, and every spring he walks back to her grave, past twelve crosses nobody else understands. He lives to be a hundred and twenty-seven. He says God forgot about him. The Man God Forgot is a dark novel of the Mexican Revolution: a good man, twelve men, and a hundred years of walking.