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Fiction

Os pecados capitais

By Francisco A. Vidal

About this book

Andrés is a drug dealer in the estuary of Arousa. His arrogance leads him to take risks and face events that make him a rich man, feared and flattered. But when the time of his death comes, Andrés has to face all the ghosts in his past, a past of evil in which he had to come out on top whatever the cost, and by whatever means. With Andrés in his deathbed different people who lived with him and who are now awaiting his death share the story of their difficult relationships with the trafficker: the priest, his maid, his lawyer, his son, his friend Indalecio… until Andrés himself confesses. Even at death's door, he judges those surrounding him, is still proud and dismissive.

Francisco A. Vidal was awarded the Premio Terra de Melide 2005 for Os pecados capitais. This is a novel of multiple perspectives (seven characters tell the story), a captivating story of a man who wants to succeed in country where the only chance of doing so is through emigrating. This thirst for growth shall lead him to tobacco trafficking and later to the “prosperous” business of drugs.

Book fragment

– Father Camilo, it is your turn. Let’s hope that you can do something for his soul as there is nothing we can do for his body.

Father Camilo entered the room looking right and left, as if he was entering a forbidden territory, as if he was entering for the first time in a strange house. He came in struggling to adjust his sight to the dim light, to the darkness hardly mitigated by a table lamp at very low power and there he stood, arranging his stole two steps inside the room that smelt of medicines and old men, without daring to approach the dying man. He stood and stared at the bed until he could make out a small broken line, that wrinkled mark that was Mr. Andrés, so still, twisted, immobile, weakly breathing with a monotonous sound, like some kind of powerless snore, like a lion breathing its last. And he did not feel any pity, or compassion, or consideration, or pain, or sorrow, thinking with some bitterness that there was no way anybody could save that soul, thinking about how painful it was for him to guide the last hours of that life that had hurt him so much, so that that soul should not get lost in the labyrinths of eternity.