“Please, go in, Alicia, and I’ll introduce you to the rest,” Bea urged her as she closed the bedroom door behind her.

Joining two tables together—which filled the dining room from one end to the other and even part of the corridor—Bea had achieved the miracle of seating the eleven guests invited to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday. Daniel was still downstairs, closing the bookshop, while his father, Julián, and Bea had accompanied Alicia up the stairs. Bernarda, Fermín’s wife, was already waiting there. She had set the table and was giving the last touches to a stew that sent out a heavenly aroma.

“Bernarda, come, let me introduce you to Señorita Alicia Gris.”

Bernarda wiped her hands on her apron and folded her arms around her.

“Do you know when Fermín is coming?” Bea asked her.

“Oh, Señora Bea, I’m up to my back teeth with that scoundrel’s tale about the bubbly wine he says is full of pee. Forgive me, Señorita Alicia, but my husband is as pigheaded as a fighting bull and doesn’t stop talking nonsense. You must pay no attention to him.”

“If he takes much longer, I can see us toasting with tap water,” said Bea.

“No, you won’t,” boomed a theatrical voice from the dining-room doorway.

The owner of that resonant instrument turned out to be a family friend called Don Anacleto, who lived in the same block, a secondary school teacher and, according to Bea, a man of verse in his free time. Don Anacleto proceeded to kiss Alicia’s hand with a formality that would have looked outdated at Kaiser Wilhelm’s wedding. “At your service, beautiful stranger.”

“Don Anacleto, don’t bother our visitors,” Bea interrupted him. “Did you say you’d brought something to drink?”

Don Anacleto showed her two bottles wrapped in brown paper. “Forewarned is forearmed,” he said. “Being privy to the controversy arisen between Fermín and that grocer of notorious Fascist sympathies, I decided to come armed with a couple of bottles of sweet moonshine passing for aniseed from the bar across the street, in order to solve any temporary shortage of bubbly spirits.”

“It’s not Christian to toast with aniseed,” said Bernarda. “Much less moonshine.”

Don Anacleto, who couldn’t keep his eyes off Alicia, smiled with a worldly-wise air, to imply that such considerations only worried provincial people.

“So it will be a pagan toast, under Venus’s influence,” the teacher argued, giving Alicia a wink. “And tell me, would you, damsel of such remarkable presence, do me the honor of sitting next to me?”

Bea pushed the teacher to the other end of the room. “Don Anacleto,” she warned him, “move along and don’t overwhelm Alicia with your windy talk. You’re sitting there at the junior end of the table until you prove you can join the adults.”

Don Anacleto shrugged and went over to express his best wishes to the birthday man while two more guests entered the room. One of them was a fine-looking man in a suit, trim and dapper as a model, who introduced himself as Don Federico Flaviá, the neighborhood watchmaker, and displayed exceedingly polished manners.