ughts, I have to prepare the stage for the performance. On the days when I combined hunting or fishing with paying for the company of a girl, I felt the excitement of that shared intimacy in the silence of the reedbeds; and my desire only grew when I’d see her getting more and more frightened as we plunged down barely discernible paths. Where are you taking me? she would ask, a tremor in her voice, while I wondered why fear always adds a little spice to sex: you start out searching for the light and end up in a dark labyrinth, you start out looking for the smooth marble of flesh and end up enmired in the mud of secretions. It’s exciting — satisfying — having sex in that dense vegetal boudoir; desire and fear all in one, the ideal combination. And yet, once it was over, I would feel dirtier and guiltier than if I’d done it somewhere else, by which I mean some pokey little room with closed windows and a dim light that was sometimes red, sometimes pink and, at others, vaguely blue; or the nocturnal, ghostly back seat of the car, trembling legs next to an open door. Sex that only intensified the postcoital sadness that seems innate in the human animal. Whenever I had sex here, by the lagoon, I was looking for a sense of freedom, and yet it seemed to me I wasn’t the only one left feeling soiled, which is how I usually feel after my venal contacts in those ill-lit rooms (I relieve it with a vigorous shower when I get home, sponging myself down with plenty of soap and finishing off with a generous sprinkling of eau de Cologne); except for one woman, it always felt as if I was soiling the place itself, which is rather paradoxical, given that the lagoon has long been a kind of neglected backyard for the neighboring towns, one where everything was permitted and where decades of garbage and filth have been allowed to accumulate. It’s only with the latest fad for conservation and ecology that the area has acquired some symbolic value, and the newspapers and the local TV station describe it as the area’s great green lung (the sea is the other great, powerful lung, the one that growls and hisses and grows angry and washes us all), and they refer to it as a refuge for indigenous species and a special place for migrating birds to nest. Until about ten years ago, Bernal, the manufacturer of asphalt roofing felt, used the lagoon as a dumping ground for any defective material. Everyone knew about it and yet it never occurred to anyone to report it. Bernal went entirely unpunished. Just like his father, although he was apparently more civilized than his father. I’m not joking. In the 1940s, his father, who owned a few fishing boats, used to get rid of the occasional awkward corpse by putting it in a boat, tying a stone around its neck and then dropping it over the side into the vast, merciful Canal de Ibiza, where the waters separating Spain from the island are at their deepest: you find the best prawns and the best red tuna there, the kind that they say is going extinct. A corpse is organic matter, nutrients. The sea washes everything clean or else drives it out or gobbles it up, purifies with iodine and saltpeter, uses and recycles: one assumes the water there is healthy, not like the lagoon, which is always viewed by the people living nearby as an unhealthy, fetid place, stagnant water that can’t be trusted, liquid that grows warm and putrid in the spring sun and is only washed clean again when the first cold drops of rain fall in the autumn. The sea cleanses and oxygenates, the lagoon rots — like wars, police stations and prisons. They rot you, don’t they, Dad? They stink. Lagoons don’t get a very good press: fever, malaria, filth. The Romans drained lakes like this for reasons of health and economy, I’ve seen it on TV documentaries: Rome was surrounded by infectious swamps, like our own dear marsh, beads in the malarial necklace of the Mediterranean, a marshy chain scattered along the coast; until very recently, farmers, with their hunger for arable land, have always systematically drained all the lakes in the area. The novelist Blasco Ibáñez described the process, which nowadays is considered highly prejudicial to the environment, but thanks to which a lot of people managed to make a living here. Anyone who hasn’t read the novel is sure to have seen the TV series. I’ve read the book: the edition my grandfather bought before the war must still be knocking around in the house somewhere (we saved half a dozen or so of the books from one of the boxes my grandmother buried, I don’t think there can be many more than that in the whole house), and I watched the series they showed a few years back. The seashore has never been a hospitable place and, apart from a few promontories, it remained deserted until a few decades ago, when they started building wherever they wanted. In Misent, for example, there are housing developments right on the beach with names like La Laguna, Las Balsas, Saladar or El Marjal, whose inhabitants all complain that their houses get flooded with the onset of the autumn rains. But what sensible person would think of buying a place in a development with a name like that? The names of the places retain the memory of what they were. Lagoons. Quagmires. Ponds. Bogs. Salt pans. My father felt a particular scorn for people who bought houses and apartments in areas reclaimed from the lagoon. In fact, he scorned all those who arrived in the area drawn by the call of the sea. Lazybones. Adventurers. Speculators. The coast is an evil place, he used to say. The sea either washes up or attracts garbage, and only the scum remains. It’s always been like that: conmen, cardsharps, thugs. Although now that the human animal has become the least protected species, the ecologists probably consider what Bernal Jr. did as less forgivable than what his father did, because the worst sin has always been to destroy the eternal (no sin committed against the Holy Spirit can ever be forgiven) and for our materialistic society the eternal is no longer God, which means that the human body doesn’t merit the respect it once enjoyed when it was deemed to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, no, now the great shrine of the divinity is nature: impregnating water and mud with asphalt roofing felt — bituminous matter, glass fiber, carcinogenic asbestos — which is what Bernal Jr. did — seems far worse than the murders his father committed. If you throw a corpse into the sea, you’re doing the environment a favor, supplying food for the fish to nibble on with their small cold mouths. The sins of the gunmen — who turned ditches into graves and peppered the walls of cemeteries with bullets, who fed the fishes out at sea — those were all absolved by the Transition, because apparently they were only venial sins, whereas the sins committed against the environment have no expiry date and no judge can absolve them. Let’s not deceive ourselves, man is nothing very special. In fact, there are so many of us that our governments don’t know what to do with us all. Six billion humans on the planet and only six or seven thousand Bengal tigers: tell me — who needs protecting most? Yes, you decide who needs most care. A dying African, Chinaman or Scotsman or a beautiful tiger killed by a hunter. A tiger with its pelt of matchless colors and its flashing eyes is far more beautiful than a varicose-veined old jerk like me. What a difference in the way it carries itself. How elegant the one and how clumsy the other. Look how they move. Put them next to each other in a cage in the zoo. The children gather round the old man’s cage and laugh as they watch him delousing himself or crouching down to defecate; outside the tiger’s cage, though, they open their eyes wide with admiration. The sleight of hand that made man the center of the universe no longer convinces. It’s true that we can recognize human animals by their gestures, faces and voices, and this arouses our sympathy, but we can also recognize the features of the domestic cat or dog we live with, we can attribute feelings to them too. Voices are another matter: Could you help me fold the sheets. No, not like that, the other way. God, those great clumsy hands of yours make me laugh, oh, sorry, I only meant that you look as if you could tear the cloth just by touching it. And when I said “clumsy,” I didn’t mean that your hands were ugly — they’re very strong, no, not ugly at all, you have lovely hands, virile hands, a man’s hands.