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Extract (LIfe and Death)
"Well, there were two sisters who lived in a place called Mandouro. They lived on their own, in a bungalow left to them by their parents. From the house you could see the sea and all the ships leaving Europe bound for the South Seas. One sister was Life and the other, Death. They were two good girls, a pleasure to look at and be with." "The one called Death was pretty as well?" Dombodán asked with concern. "She was. Well, she was pretty, if a bit horse-like. The point is the two of them got on very well. Since they had so many suitors, they had made a promise: they could flirt with men, even get involved, but never go their separate ways. And they kept their word. On feast days they would go down to the dance together, in the company of all the other young people in the district, to a place called Donaire. To get there, they had to cross marshland, full of mud-flats and known as Fronteira. The two sisters would wear their clogs and carry their shoes. Death´s shoes wear white and Life´s were black." "Don´t you mean the other way round?" "No, I mean just what I say. In reality, all the girls did what the two sisters did. They would wear their clogs and carry their shoes, so that their shoes were clean when it came to the dancing. This way, at the door of the dance, you´d get as many as a hundred pairs of clogs lined up like rowing-boats along the sand. The boys were differet. The boys would ride an horseback. And perform all kinds of tricks on their mounts as they arrived and left, especially as they arrived, to impress the girls. And so time passed. The two sisters attended the dance, had the occasional fling, but always, sooner or later, they returned home. "One night, a cold, winter´s night, there was a shipwreck. As you know, there have always been and still are a lot of shipwrecks off our coast. But this was a very special shipwreck. The boat was called the Palermo and containd a cargo of accordions. A thousand accordions packaged in wood. The storm sank the boat and swept the cargo towards the coast. The sea, its arms like those of a crazed stevedore, smashed up the boxes and carried the accordions in towards the shore. The whole night, the accordions played tunes which you can understand were fairly sad. The music was driven in through the windows by the gale. Everyone in the district was woken and heard it, and the two sisters were scared stiff, like everyone else. In the morning, the accordions lay on the beaches like the corpses of drowned instruments. All of them were useless. All of them bar one. It was found by a young fisherman in a cave. He was so struck by the coincidence that he learned to play it. He was already a spirited, cheerful young men, but the accordion gave him an unusual grace, At the dance, Life fell for him so completely that she decided that love was worth more than the bond with her sister. And they absconded togueter, because Life knew that Death had a foul temper and could be very vindictive. And so she was. She has never forgiven her for it. This is why she roams to and fro, especially on stormy nights, stops at houses with clogs at the door, and asks whomever she meets, 'Do you know of a young accordionist and that slut, Life?' And because the person asked does not know, she takes them with her."
... "They´re going to kill us all! Don´t you see? They´re going to kill us all!" From The Carperter´s Pencil (Manuel Rivas) Pag. 20-23
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