The schoolmaster and the civil servant, both elderly bachelors, were longtime residents; the sisters had traveled from Soria to Morocco in mid-July to bury a relative and saw the Strait closed to marine traffic before they were able to return home; something similar had happened to the hair products salesman, kept in the Protectorate against his will as a result of the insurgency. The mother and son had other reasons that were less clear, though everyone assumed they had come in search of an elusive husband and father who one fine morning had gone out to buy tobacco on Toledo’s Plaza de
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