The funeral services collected the body and transported it to the morgue, where all destitute people ended up, together with unidentified bodies and the abandoned souls the city left behind every night. At dawn, two workers put him into a canvas bag bearing the stench of hundreds of other bodies that had made their last journey inside it, and lifted it into the back of a truck. They drove up the old road bordering Montjuïc Castle, which was outlined against a sea of fire and a thousand silhouettes of angels and spirits in the city of the dead, figures that seemed to have gathered there to spit their last insult at him as he made his way to the common grave where in another life he, the beggar, the invisible man, had sent so many whose names he barely remembered.

When they reached the grave, an endless well of bodies covered with lime, the two men opened the bag and let Don Mauricio Valls slide down the hillside of cadavers until he reached the bottom. They say he fell faceup, his eyes open, and that the last thing the men saw before leaving that forsaken place was a black bird perching on his body and gouging them out with its beak, while all the bells of Barcelona tolled in the distance.

Barcelona

April 23, 1960

1

Came the day.

Shortly before dawn, Fermín woke up with his hormones raging. Heeding the call, he descended on an unsuspecting Bernarda and showered her with one of his morning love specials that would leave her exhausted for a week and the bedroom furniture askew, while rousing vigorous protests from the neighbors on the other side of the wall.

“Blame it on the full moon,” Fermín apologized to the lady next door, greeting her through the laundry room window overlooking the inner courtyard. “I don’t know what comes over me. I seem to be transformed.”

“Yes, but instead of transforming into a wolf, you turn into a pig. See if you can’t control yourself—there are children living here who haven’t yet taken their first communion.”

As was usually the case with Fermín in the aftermath of one of his arduous early performances, he felt the appetite of a tiger. He made himself a four-egg omelette with bits of chopped ham and cheese, which he polished off with a half-kilo French loaf and a small bottle of champagne to boot. Satisfied, he crowned it all with a small glass of orujo and proceeded to put on the prescribed attire for confronting a day that showed all the signs of possible complications.

“Will you tell me why you’ve dressed yourself like a diver?” asked Bernarda from the kitchen doorway.

“Out of precaution. In fact it’s an old raincoat lined with copies of one of the regime’s newspapers. Not even holy water gets through this material. Something to do with the ink they use. They say a big one’s coming.”