Xavier Alcalá

When Manuel and his friend were well seasoned by the sun and the ocean winds, the ship finally reached a sea of red-brown water which the sailors on their ship called a river. On the shore there was a big port and cluster of long, tall buildings, with police, customs, health inspection and a “Hotel for Immigrants”.

Don Emeterio Suárez de Valcarría y Candia was a great huntsman, and an even better womaniser. It was well known throughout the region that, as soon as the season opened, he’d be up in the mountains, day after day, goaded on by the smell of gunpowder with not a thought in his head but feathers and hides and trophies.

Years went by, possibly some twenty, and the spinners of Soacinsa rarely crossed Don Emeterio’s mind. Vicente da Rula fell prey to a cancer that morphine could do little to mask; and the chemist heard no more about that child in the mountains except — from what his servant had told him — that he was growing up happily, with his loving mother and the kindly verger of San Fiz whom the woman had ended up marrying.

Don Emeterio Suárez de Valcarría y Candia was a great huntsman, and an even better womaniser. It was well known throughout the region that, as soon as the season opened, he’d be up in the mountains, day after day, goaded on by the smell of gunpowder with not a thought in his head but feathers and hides and trophies. There were times when he’d be marooned by heavy snowfall and not return home for weeks — not that his family worried much about that, for there were arrangements in place for these absences of the master of the house: his wife took charge of the household and their nine sons, and they had an assistant to look after the chemist shop where the locals would still gather in the back to play cards and dominoes, buoyed by comments and conjecture about the chemist’s carryings-on.