"He was a Communist." She laughed, a startlingly girlish sound in the tiny kitchen, as though someone else might be there. "More a Communist than a santero. He believed. All the ways things failed, and in the ways we knew, that the ordinary people could not know, and still, in his way, he believed. He, like myself, had been to Russia. He, like myself, had had eyes to see. Still, he believed." She shrugged, smiling. "I think that it allowed him some extra degree of leverage, some special grasp, on those to whom we, through him, had become fastened. They had always sensed that about him, that he might believe. Not in the tragic, clownish fashion of the East Germans, but with something like innocence." The smell of toasting bread filled the kitchen. She used a small bamboo whisk to froth the milk, as it neared boiling. "Of course, they had no way to prove it. And everyone purported to believe, at least publicly."