Alberti was a noisy child whose burping was louder than a bear in the wild. All that roaring, as well he knows, left him singing very low.

Alberti était un enfant bruyant qui rotait comme un ours. Il faisait tellement de bruit, et il le savait, qu'il finit par chanter avec une voix de basse.

Alberti was a noisy child whose burping was louder than a bear in the wild. All that roaring, as well he knows, left him singing very low.

Already an old man, Cayute, the central character of the novel, undertakes an exercise in retrospection, through which we learn the history of Almoneda, an imaginary territory on the frontier between Spain and Portugal.