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the door, they hear his ingratiating tones: ‘Sira? Sira, are you there?’
    His voice echoes in the yard. Fins glances over at Brinco. His gaze now contains the fuse, dynamite, anemones. Like someone playing with a whip, he brushes his feet with the broom.
    ‘What do you say we search for that speck of shit that’s going to finish off the world?’
    Brinco doesn’t want to play along. All Fins gets back is a ration of sullen eyes. Fins knows how the other boy’s face can change. He finds it difficult to say, for example, when it’s friendly or not, happy or not. Brinco’s mood swings from one state to another, as the sky changes in Noitía. His eyes now are focused on the point where Mariscal has gone in. They scour the front of the house, pierce the stones. Gaze up at the windows on the first floor. In one of which the face of the white-suited gallant appears for a moment behind the curtain. A woman slips past him. It’s Sira. The man follows. Both vanish from sight in a flicker of shadows.

9
    BRINCO WENT IN through the back door and climbed an inner staircase which led to the first-floor landing, where the Ultramar’s rooms were. On the staircase was a warm light, of the kind afforded by bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling by twisted wires. Up on the landing, the wind introduced gusts of light which clung to the curtains. On the opposite wall, without windows, were a few typical souvenirs: ceramic plates painted with marine scenes, scallop shells, starfish and coral branches on varnished wood, oil paintings of flowers and leaves on polished planks the sea had cast up on the shore.
    With a grimy face and tense expression, Brinco walked down the carpeted landing, not bothering to push aside the curtains. He was heading for the room at the end, known by everyone at the inn simply as ‘La Suite’. He stopped in front of the closed door.
    For a short while he listened to the sighs and murmurs of the amorous struggle. Coming through a door, the human Morse emitted by pleasure sounds remarkably like the language of pain. Brinco suddenly heard his own name. A voice from afar, which penetrated the curtains’ turbulence. His father always called him by his Christian name. He didn’t like his nickname.
    ‘Víctor! Where the hell are you? Víctor!’
    Rumbo’s voice made him even angrier. With the back of his sleeve he dried the tears streaming down his grimy face. Left very carefully. Quickened his pace. Started running, furiously barging into the curtains that, with the sash windows half open, seemed to flutter in time, when in fact each was governed by its own wind in rigorous, stormy succession.
    The walls of the Ultramar’s bar were covered in posters and stills from Westerns. There was also a poster from a local group dressed up as mariachis with the name ‘Noitía’s Magicians’. And there were a few well-known faces of singers and film stars, all of them women: Sara Montiel, Lola Flores, Carmen Sevilla, Aurora Bautista, Amália Rodrigues, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. In the midst of them all, of a smaller size but in a prominent position, a black and white photograph of Sira Portosalvo with the following dedication: ‘To the one I most love and make suffer’.
    Fins was seated at a table, eating mussels boiled in their shells, which Rumbo had served him when he’d finished cleaning. As he ate, he seemed to watch and listen to everything that was being said. Over at the counter, Rumbo and a couple from the Civil Guard – Sergeant Montes and a younger guard, Vargas – were talking about cinema.
    ‘There I agree one hundred per cent with the authority,’ declared Rumbo, staring at the sergeant. ‘There’s nobody like John Wayne. Wayne and a horse. That’s enough to make a film. No need for a pretty girl or anything.’
    This categorical exclusion was followed by a silence Rumbo correctly interpreted as profound disagreement.
    ‘Though if there is a pretty girl, it makes for a perfect trio.