dinde farci aux truffes, poulardes, canard à la Rouennaise, polyglot people and hotel rooms with a view over Lake Geneva. I felt like a useless astronaut, left behind on an inhospitable meteorite, watching the rest of the crew travel on to an unknown blue planet, covered in lush vegetation, with a scattering of lakes and a population of temptress nymphs and eager fauns. Lack of ambition, environmental factors — I used to think: I am the owner of my own deficiencies. The only thing I own is what I lack, what I cannot reach, what I’ve lost, that’s what I have, what is actually mine, the empty vacuum that is me. I have what I don’t have. And I felt infinitely sorry for myself, filled with a bitterness that sometimes verged on hatred of her, a false hatred (no, I don’t think I ever hated her, I still felt aroused whenever I saw her, I desired her, yes, I desired her right up until the end, she was the only woman for me), and a false hatred of Francisco which extended to my father (and did I really hate him, do I still hate him?), or vice versa: love in absentia. They were two sides of the same coin — on one side, what seemed to me unattainable and, on the other, what was denied to me: Francisco showing me what could have been, and my father showing me the depths of the nothingness that had become my sole property. He rubbed my nose in what was not to be: the workshop, the furnished apartment where I had no space to call my own, the caged goldfinches that I took care of after Mom died, Saturday afternoons spent in my tiny room whose walls were covered in posters of Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix and Lou Reed until they grew too old and faded and I tore them down; the velvety bluish or reddish flesh standing at the bar of a club that changed locations and names over the years, but always remained the same, the half-vanished paths traversing the marsh, the smell of damp, rotting vegetation, the feathers of a duck, wet with mud and sticky with blood, the steam given off by the skin of a panting dog. The only things that were mine — before the word “mine” became only the empty space left by what I had lost — were the few escapes into adventure that I squandered and that Francisco was able to turn to his advantage. We undertook those adventures together, or, rather, Francisco dragged me along in his wake: a few months in Paris, probably for the sole reason that, in order to live life in style or at least try to, it was assumed you had to go to Paris; a spell in London because, at the time, that was where the avant-garde was happening — op art and pop art, everything that was “in” was there; a few months in Ibiza, before the hippies arrived, but where there were already a few people who grew marijuana and somehow or other got hold of Mexican or Guatemalan peyote, which they chewed slowly with religious unction, following the teachings of their shaman, Castaneda. Laila used to make some delicious hemp seed cakes and, after eating them, we would laugh or cry at the memory of something or other, and end up snuggled against somebody’s chest. I think her name was Laila, although I’m not sure now. And I can’t remember either if I had anything much else on my mind then. I occasionally returned from those adventures feeling slightly disgusted (although now I couldn’t say quite why) and totally broke (and I do know the reason for that). In bullfighting terms, I would say that I felt the bull’s tendency to return to the same spot in the ring, I was building my own corral, voluntarily fencing myself in, drawn by the call of house and cradle; if you press me, I would say I was answering the call of the womb, and Leonor gave me that: after all, what is sex but the desire to be enclosed again in that soft, pink arena: to climb back inside someone through any one of her orifices, a desire to return to that warm, dark inner space, to be rocked in amniotic fluid, cradled by mucous secretions. Equally uterine were the washed shirts, ironed and neatly put away in the chest of drawers, the dazzling white underwear (my mother’s block of Lagarto soap, her laundry bluing bleach, the clothes swaying in the sun on the washing lines on the terrace roof beneath the blue dome of the sky, I can see it, smell it), the hot succulent risotto in a bowl on the table cloth and made variously with beans, turnips, greens, pig’s knuckles or ears, and blood sausage. And yet even now I blame my father for my frequent scamperings back home. That’s the version I’ve given to other people, although not to anyone in the village, I haven’t told them anything, what would be the point, I’d just be providing them with fodder for jokes or sideswipes, it’s not a good idea to tell people in Olba any truths, but I did talk about it to the friends I met abroad, with some of whom I remained in touch either by letter or phone (what will have become of them? nearly fifty years have passed since then and yet I still remember them, how many of them will now be nothing but skin and bone?), who were friends for a while, and with whom I used to drink a café Calva near the Bastille in Paris, opposite the stop for some bus heading out into the suburbs (Vitry, Ivry, Maisons-Alfort, Vincennes), or a pint of beer in Camden; the friends I made during the few months I spent at art school and never saw again, it’s the story I’ve always told myself, whining on about what I could have become but didn’t. I tell myself that it was my father who tied me to the workshop, who clipped my wings the way farmers clip the wings of the geese in the pen so that they won’t fly away when they hear the call of the migrating birds heading north from the lagoon (ornithologists ring them every year and have proved that they migrate to England, Russia and Sweden, all the great-great-grandchildren of the goose who carried Nils Holgersson in the books I read as a child), the padre padrone who demanded that I stay by his side, because all the other children had flown the coop. One of them had traveled beyond the nebulous destination of those migrating geese: Germán had, for some months already, been living in the land of no return. Carmen had just escaped to Barcelona, almost a child, said my father with tears in his eyes — the only time I’ve ever seen him cry — and the third, the flim-flam man, Juan, was flitting about who knows where. I returned home to the rule of staying put. My father’s insistence on this had become more urgent since my eldest brother died. His need to possess. He wanted me here, to be with him, he wanted an assistant and an heir who would give meaning to his work (