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commandments of naturism. As they lay sunbathing, naked on the warm rocks, which were carpeted in velvet moss and golden lichen, the cherry pendulum hanging over their lips, measuring time from outside in, everything that was said sounded like the flowering of reason. The fourth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not forget to bathe every day in cold water’. This got a boo. ‘Where’s the prophet from?’ ‘Dr Nigro Basciano is from Brazil.’ ‘That explains it.’ As for the rest, they were in agreement. Until the tenth one: ‘Thou shalt not eat meat or murder the poor animals, but be merciful to them. Mens sana in corpore sano. Finis . Amen.’
    There was a pause, which lasted as long as the cherries.
    ‘After the celebrations you mean!’ exclaimed Polka finally.
    ‘What?’
    ‘All that being merciful to animals.’
    ‘You treat everything as a joke,’ said Holando. ‘Slaughterhouses are a horrific spectacle. Go down to Orzán when there’s a slaughter. The sea stained with the blood of animals. It’s a prehistoric shame. Cows should be sacred here as well.’
    ‘That’s why we eat them,’ intervened Anceis, who rarely spoke. Aurelio Anceis was serious and thoughtful. When he did speak, he seemed to regret it afterwards. He was about to leave for Pasai San Pedro to join a Basque cod-fishing trawler. He had only two days. He was also a poet. A secret poet. He’d started writing what he called ‘SOS poems’ in the wake of the seafaring poet Manoel Antonio, the avant-garde author of From Four to Four . He hadn’t published any even in his friends’ newspaper Brazo y Cerebro . One of the few people he showed them to was Arturo da Silva. He saw a connection between writing poems, as he understood it, and boxing.
    ‘Just like Christ,’ he added.
    ‘I don’t understand the comparison,’ replied Holando.
    ‘Why did people want Barabbas released and Christ crucified? It was, so to speak, a question of gastronomic quality. Who to eat. The divine tastes better. A kind of homoeopathy. The cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Holy Week with its celebration of Calvary and the Crucifixion. The Sacrament of Communion. The need to feed on what’s sacred. Greek singers ate crickets, the athletes ate grasshoppers.’
    He heard them laugh and blinked. He’d made them laugh, no one had imitated his voice. His friends were laughing. They were good fun. They talked of revolution as if it were a party. For days now, they’d been preparing a trip to Caneiros. There was going to be a special train. Then they’d take boats up the Mandeo’s sparkling waters to the heart of the forest. There’d be libertarian speeches, plenty of food and music, lots of music. It was a beautiful day, heaven on earth, it was a sin not to be happy. So he said:
    ‘Sorry.’
    Actually he was thinking about a poem in which words were crumbs of bread on an oilskin tablecloth. He hadn’t slept all night; for the first time, his body seemed aware it would soon leave land on a long journey. The fingers of silence, working like moth wings, had polished rounded breadcrumbs with the inflamed accuracy of the beads of an astral rosary. One of those rounded crumbs was the sun on that second Sunday in July.
    ‘Sorry, Holando.’
    ‘You’ve nothing to be sorry about. What I’m saying is we don’t have to sacrifice animals in order to survive. In a more civilised society, there’d be more than enough food. It’s in the richest countries where most animals are sacrificed needlessly. Do you know why the buffalo almost died out on the great American prairies? Because of its tongue. The Indians used everything; wholesale slaughter was down to the whites. Buffalo tongue was a fashionable dish in New York restaurants. Buffalo Bill was a killing machine, an industrial-scale hunter. He’s said to have killed more than three thousand buffaloes in a day singlehandedly.’
    ‘Three thousand?’
    They gazed out over the ripe Elviña valley and on to Granxa by the