“Either we all arrive alive, or we fall by the wayside,” said the taxi driver.

“That’s the spirit.”

Fermín saw they were approaching Paseo de Colón at cruising speed. A wall of trams, cars, and humanity rose five seconds ahead. The driver clutched the wheel with all his might, muttering some verbal abuse.

Commending his soul to the goddess Fortune or whoever happened to be on call, Fermín smiled weakly at Fernandito. “Hold tight, son.”

Never had a four-wheeled object sliced through the traffic on Paseo de Colón so recklessly, provoking a roar of hoots, insults, and curses. Having crossed the avenue, the taxi plunged into the area leading to La Barceloneta, where it pulled into a street as narrow as a sewage tunnel, taking with it a team of motorbikes parked on the edges.

“Bravo, maestro!” Fermín chanted.

At last they sighted the beach and a purple-tinged Mediterranean. The taxi swung into the hospital’s front entrance and stopped opposite two ambulances, letting out a deep mechanical groan of surrender and scrap metal. A veil of steam emerged from the sides of the bonnet.

“You’re a star,” Fermín declared, patting the driver’s shoulder. “Fernandito, take this champion’s name and his number plate, we’ll send him a Christmas hamper, with ham and turrones included.”

“I’ll be quite happy as long as you never hail my taxi again.”

Twenty seconds later a squadron of nurses took Alicia out of the car, placed her on a stretcher, and rushed off with her to the operating room, while Fermín ran alongside her, his hands pressing the wound.

“You’re going to need a few hectoliters of blood,” he warned. “You can take as much as you like from me. I may have a lean frame, but I have more liquid reserves than the national park of Aigüestortes.”

“Are you related to the patient?” asked a porter who came up to him at the entrance to the surgery department.

“I’m the alternate father figure and designated parental backup,” replied Fermín.

“And what does that mean?”

“It means get out of my way or I’ll find myself in the painful need to catapult your scrotum up your neck by kneeing you in the balls. Are we clear?”

The porter stood to one side, and Fermín accompanied Alicia until she was snatched from his hands and he saw her land, pale as a ghost, on an operating table. The nurses were cutting off her clothes with scissors, exposing her battered body, covered in bruises, scratches, and cuts, and revealing the wound from which blood flowed unremittingly. Fermín caught a glimpse of the dark scar clamped onto one of her hips, spreading across her anatomy like a web about to devour her. He clenched his fists to stop his hands from shaking.

Alicia searched him with eyes that were veiled with tears, a feeble smile on her lips. Fermín prayed to the Limping Devil, the perennial favorite patron of doomed scenarios, not to take her away yet.

“What’s your blood group?” asked a voice next to him.