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By Root 553 0

the paramilitaries. The back seats fold down, so the car can be used for transporting cargo and people. Ideal if you’ve a large family. They confiscated two cars from the same owner. The black and the cherry Opel. The cherry Opel, a soft-top, is a beauty. Not that the owner was a tycoon. He made his money in America and, on his return, set up a garage and car-wash. He was crazy about cars. Now he prefers to walk. Avoids cars if he can. When they went to take them, he stuttered, said he’d already given money, paid what they’d asked. He was obviously fond of the cherry Opel. That summer, he’d taken his daughters and their friends for a ride along the coastal road. The driver of the death outing remembers it well. It happened by chance. They’d just been practising their shots in Bastiagueiro, greasing and warming their weapons for the military coup that was close. Having finished their training, they returned to the road, openly dressed in Fascist uniform, and one of the cars that passed by was the cherry soft-top with Mr Alvedro and the four girls wearing white silk chiffon with floral patterns. The driver remembers it with a kaleidoscopic memory. Their eyes were used to aiming at the target, concentrating so hard that all the rest – the ocean, the city grafted on to sea rock – disappeared behind the small black sign with white circles. So their eyes reacted like bees that have found their way out of darkness through the eye of a bullet when they saw the cherry soft-top come into view with those girls wearing floral patterns, their hair trailing in the breeze. They shouted. Or rather they burst in unison into a sound that might also be described as a return bullet. A visual onomatopoeia: their eyes snarled in the wake of the car accelerating down the road to Santa Cruz lined with plane trees.

Confused, perplexed, stuttering, his voice trembling, Mr Alvedro tried to stop them taking them.

‘You can see they’re no cars for war,’ he said.

He knew they were going to take them anyway. They hadn’t come to discuss mechanics, but to hop in the cars and leave. However, he felt he had to speak for them. To intercede. Say something. For the cars. He loved so much. It was a moral obligation. When they were returned, if that ever happened, they wouldn’t be the same. The vehicles stood waiting, in the shadows, lost in thought. Heads bowed.

‘The cherry’s just for outings.’

Since everyone remained silent, what he’d said swept around the corners. He realised the terrible import of the word ‘outings’. When they changed hands, things acquired a different meaning. As if he’d unwittingly said, ‘The cherry’s just for killing.’

‘That’s why we’re taking it, Mr Alvedro,’ said one of the confiscators. ‘To go on outings.’

The driver smacks his lips as if he were chewing gum, but he isn’t. He simply accumulates saliva, which he then chews. He comes to a halt just in front of the Montoyas. In the short distance that’s left, Antonio stops singing and the night’s dark breeze whirls around the Opel. The driver chews his ball of spit. The other two get out of the car, holding their pistols, aim at the basket-makers and force the Montoyas to lie down in the back, without heeding their protests. The youngest doesn’t want to let go of the baskets or maybe it’s the other way around. He’s learning the trade and fingers and osiers still form part of the weaving. The Opel pulls off. The Montoyas turn up dead in Montrove the next morning. Each with a bullet hole in their head. ‘Meningeal haemorrhage’, it says on the death certificates.

Coffee. Meningeal haemorrhage.

They were passing by.

‘They killed three basket-makers who were passing by. One of them was your age.’

‘Passing by where? Where they killed the champ?’

‘No. Wherever it happened to be. They came across the murderers’ car and were given coffee.’

As soon as he spoke, he regretted using that expression. The unreality of euphemisms. A petty, macabre genre.

‘Coffee?’

‘They killed them.’

‘Were they anarchists as well?’

‘They were just some basket-making gypsies. One of them was fourteen, another