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of foreigners were either sitting at café tables or strolling aimlessly about, looking at the boats and the catch of turtles which had been tethered with floats to rings. Red-burnt tourists in shorts and colourful shirts were wandering about in the alleys among half-naked children and thin black pigs. A couple of civil guards were standing in the shade of the fish-shed. They were absently watching the crowd on the quay. A small priest in a wide, flat hat was tripping along the row of houses. His long black skirts flapped round his legs and he kept his eyes on the ground, as if to avoid seeing such horrors.
    Tourism had broken through in the puerto. The desperate need for foreign currency had persuaded the authorities to ease the restrictions on entry into the country. Here, as in hundreds of other places along the coast, the outer forms were in the process of loosening up. Strangers no longer received printed notes to say that it was forbidden to show yourself out of doors with a naked torso, or appear in shorts, two-piece bathing costumes or dresses with shoulder-straps, or to kiss in the street or to insult the Caudillo and his almighty realm. Foreigners must be treated well, as they brought money to the state. Money which was to be used for the poor and the ignorant. Soon the civil guard would be equipped with automatic weapons in place of their out-of-date old carbines.
    A number of private individuals also made money out of the foreigners. These were the people who had their own businesses and had already been in a good position before. The ordinary people were just as poor as ever, though they had possibly become more conscious of their situation.
    And that was where the risk lay.
    The police had been reinforced, but at the same time their role had become more one of observation. Like the priesthood, the civil guard now worked preferably in silence and they mostly waited until the winter.
    The patrols from La Policia Secreta very rarely showed themselves during the summer months and then only very late at night.
    A number of people, especially irresponsible young men, who were much too young to have experienced the great battle for righteousness, seemed inclined to sacrifice their humility, faith, truth and purity for other forms of life and ideals.
    Their names were carefully registered by the supervisors of both worldly and heavenly powers, a natural procedure, which on the whole they survived. Far worse was to land in the quagmire between the life they had been brought up in and the diffuse visions of something else, told to them by sun-shocked Scandinavians and half-naked German office girls.
    In September the tourists went away and the hunt for Communists could begin again.
    As could the battle for souls.
    The ordinary personnel in the civil guard was often changed, according to an involved circulation system decided at regional headquarters in the town up in the mountains.
    It was thirteen kilometres up there. From the quay one could see the town like a blurred shadow against the greyish-yellow of the mountain.
    In the town in the mountains there were people who knew what was happening in the village by the sea without ever having to go there.
    They cut off the village by the sea as if it were an enemy bridgehead during the war. They closed an iron ring round it, but very few strangers ever noticed that detail.
    From the puerto only one road led into the mountains.

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    Dan Pedersen swung round into one of the side-streets and pressed the accelerator down as far as it would go to clear the slope. He energetically blew the horn and children, pigs and cats fled out of the way. Some strolling tourists pressed themselves against the wall and stared in surprise with round blue eyes. Then the camioneta stopped outside Jacinto’s bar.
    It lay at the highest point in the village, only a block away from the church, and from the outside there was not much to see. There were no tables on the street, only a couple of basket