you home with me, Leonor, and shut myself up with you in my room, our room, we could never have come out of the bathroom and walked down the corridor naked or sunbathed on the roof terrace or made love without worrying that someone in the next room might hear us sigh or moan, or hear the mattress creaking, never, I could never even masturbate in peace, my mother was always watching and listening: I don’t like you locking yourself in your room, Esteban, I’m always afraid something might be wrong. My father’s harsh voice: we’re not thieves in this house, you know, there’s no need to shut your door. But it wasn’t just because the carpentry workshop was part of the house I’ve always lived in, it’s more because I’ve carried the cross of this business for more than forty years now, I mean, what else have I done with my life? Fishing, hunting, a few games of cards in the evening, going out drinking on Friday and Saturday nights — as I did for a few years — preceded only, during the time when I managed to be defined by neither house nor workshop, by a short walk on what I thought was the wild side (the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix); and yet what should have been part of the sentimental education of a hero of our times — as it was for Francisco — turned out, in my case, to be of no importance whatsoever: Can’t you hear the music, Leonor? It’s playing now, you must be able to hear it, all those groups playing at the same time and driving me mad. I could multiply that list by ten, doubtless because I lack judgment or still have no confident, mature sense of what I like, because I’m incapable of saying, as Leonor did, this is brilliant and this is garbage, then heading straight for the thing I’ve chosen without caring what or who I trample on the way. I sampled this and that, and it all seemed good, nourishing stuff to me, but I probably lacked focus, character, get-up-and-go, or whatever. That break during the mid-sixties did get me out of here, but I didn’t have the courage or the intelligence to convert that experience into the embryo of another way of life; like Álvaro, I gave in and chose the easy chair: at first, I called that easy chair Leonor — fool that I was, because she was restlessness personified, constantly choosing between this and that — but Leonor made her choice and left, while I stayed behind and made the workshop in Olba my solitude. I didn’t even go to the bar (a recurrence of the symptoms of the infection inherited from my father), I saw no one, spent whole weeks without leaving the house; yes, I was a true heir to my father, he returning from his war and me from mine; he from icy Teruel and me from the cold, rainy boulevards and orange lights of Paris. Two defeated men. As he locked the workshop door from inside, I would go upstairs to my room, where I found myself in a kind of nowhere-land; initially, I felt claustrophobic shut up in there, listening over and over to the fifty or so LPs I’d brought with me, plus those that Francisco brought me on his visits later on. It wasn’t enough to open the windows in order to drive out anxiety, because there was a wall surrounding Olba, I could almost see it in the distance, to the south, the boundary line: the houses in Misent, the cliffs blurred by mist, the little shapes of the fishing boats coming back as evening fell, followed by a flock of seagulls; and on the other side, the stony slopes of Montdor. From the roof terrace, I could see those boundaries stretching to the north as well, the great void of the lagoon, the endless reedbeds; the curve of the beaches that, over time, have disappeared behind the many blocks of apartments and houses; I gradually got used to it: a couple of times a month I’d get spruced up and take the workshop van: Are you off out again? Can’t you just stay quietly at home or go for a walk in the hills? Walking’s good for the health: my father. Sometimes, I would put my wellington boots and the rifle in the van too so that he’d think I was going hunting, and then I’d turn up at the club in the early evening, when you’re unlikely to meet anyone you know, and if you do, it’s because they don’t want to meet anyone they know either, a time when the girls are just starting to take up their positions at the bar. Even now, that’s the time I usually choose to go there, when they’re chatting to each other, sharing the music they’ve recorded on their cell phones, exchanging songs and ring tones, and I quickly select one of them (aren’t you at least going to buy me a drink? what’s the big hurry?), diversions that have never touched the very kernel of my rat-like existence, clinging desperately to a passing piece of wreckage and jockeying for space with my fellow rats, competing for salvation. The gloomy workshop, whose destruction I should see as a slave’s freedom papers, but which feels instead like a painful mutilation. The way a woman must feel when her child is torn from her: that was my first thought. A child given to me in adoption has been torn from me. Does that sound familiar, Leonor? We have each, in our own way, suffered a loss; I know, I know, your loss was an exercise in emptying yourself out, whereas I have merely removed an excrescence, no, you’re right, it isn’t the same: your loss was insignificant or, rather, liberating, while all I’m losing is an innocuous, transmissible bit of property inherited from my father, and which he inherited from his father, an under-nourished, ill-fed piece of property; the workshop closed its doors during the years he spent in prison, and only the odd jobs my uncle did kept things going until my father, on his release, rather reluctantly took up the reins again. I wouldn’t have had anyone to leave the business to anyway. If Álvaro were to keep it going for a few years longer, it would still be a business run by two old men. Or “two poor old men,” as he would say, growing wrinkled and decrepit and already beginning to rot. While my father was away, my uncle, an adolescent at the time, did odd jobs in people’s houses: mending doors, building tool sheds, making chicken runs or rabbit hutches on modest roof terraces (the post-war years brought farming into the villages, just so that people had something to eat); my father started the business up again in the face of great difficulties — so he did still have some ambition when he left prison, his apathy was a bit of a pose really, even if, as an artist turned laborer, it meant that he was unable to fulfill his possible aspirations — but that was also when the business first fell prey to the disease that brought it to its later state of decay, symptomatic of the times. And left in my hands, it has died without issue. Yes, Leonor, the tale of a barren creature. Liliana: you don’t understand because you don’t have any children of your own. Very true, I know nothing of such things.