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about this guy? What do you care? Sluts, you’re a bunch of sluts!’ Sergeant Landesa took hold of me and said, ‘Come on, Herbal, we’ve still got work to do.’”

7

    DOCTOR DA BARCA HADA GIRLFRIEND. AND THAT girlfriend was the most beautiful woman in the world. In the world that Herbal had seen and, he was sure, in the one he had not seen. Marisa Mallo. He was the son of poor peasant farmers. In his house in the village there were very few pretty things. He remembered it without nostalgia, full of smoke or flies. Like a pipeline stretched across time, the memory stank of manure and carbide gas. Beginning with the walls, everything had a patina like rancid bacon, a sooty yellow colour that got in the eyes. In the morning, when he left with the cows, he saw everything through those sooty yellow glasses. He even saw the green meadows in this way. But there were two things in the house he looked upon as treasures. One was his little sister, Beatriz, a blonde, blue-eyed girl, who always had a cold and a runny nose. The other was an old quince tin where mother kept her jewellery: some jet earrings, a rosary, a medal made of Venezuelan gold as soft as chocolate, a silver peso from the reign of Alfonso XII, which she had inherited from her father, and some mother-of-pearl hairslides. There was also a little jar with two aspirin and his first tooth.
    He would placethe tooth in the palm of his hand and to him it resembled a grain of rye which a mouse had nibbled. But the really pretty object was the old tinplate box, which had gone rusty at the joins. On the lid was the image of a young woman with a fruit in her hand, a back comb in her hair, and a red dress with a pattern of white flowers and flounces on the sleeves. The first time he saw Marisa Mallo, it was as if she had descended from the quince box to stroll about the main market-place in Fronteira. They had gone there to sell a pig and some early potatoes. It was two miles from the village to the town on foot along muddy tracks. His father went in front, with his felt hat and daughter in his arms, his mother went behind, carrying the heavy basket on her head, and he was in the middle, pulling at the pig, which was tied with a halter around its leg. To his despair, the animal kept trying to nuzzle into the mud and when they reached Fronteira it looked like a large mole. His father slapped him across the face. “Who’s going to buythis pig now?” And there he was, at the market, wiping away the encrusted dirt with a handful of straw when he lifted his head and saw her go by. She stood out like a young woman from the cluster of other girls, who seemed to accompany her only in order to point to her and say here is the queen. They came and went like a band of butterflies and he followed them with his eyes, while his father blasphemed because no-one was going to buy that scruffy pig, and it was all his fault. He dreamt that the pig was a lamb and she came and ran her fingers through its curls. “We should be selling you, not the pig,” his father would mutter. “Though I doubt anyone would want you.”
    “That’s just the way my father was. If he started the day cursing, there was no going back, like someone constantly digging a cesspit under their feet. And I would think to myself yes, please, if someone could come and buy me and take me away with a string tied to my leg.”
    In the end, they sold the pig and the new potatoes. And mother was able to buy a tin of oil with the image of another woman, who also looked like Marisa Mallo. They returned to the main market in Fronteira on many other occasions. He no longer cared about his father’s mood. To him these days were like holidays, the only ones with any sense in the whole year. Putting out the cows to graze, he would yearn for the first day of the month to arrive. And this is how he observed the growing and blooming of Marisa Mallo, member of the region’s powerful families, goddaughter to the mayor, daughter to