This morning, however, the calm is absolute, no engines, no voices trouble the air, and the still water reflects the blue of the sky, the passing clouds and the vegetation on the shoreline, duplicating the changing landscape. While I walk, it occurs to me that my uncle taught me pretty much everything. Handling a rifle, choosing the right bait for the right fish, laying traps baited with rotten giblets that quickly fill up with crabs, setting the nets to catch eels, even what carpentry I know I learned from him. Yes, he taught me almost everything, except my despairing view of the world, the certainty that every human being is guilty as charged. That’s in the blood, my father’s blood, which I inherited along with his harsh voice and gaze. As Leonor would say: he’s a man who still believes we’re in the middle of a war and that the most interesting battle is yet to come. That’s what my father taught me, and he wouldn’t allow me even that one ounce of innocence you need if you are to aspire to anything. I was neither a sculptor nor a cabinetmaker, which the dictionary defines as a skilled joiner who works with high-quality wood, a maker of fine furniture, Renaissance writing desks like the one created by my grandfather and my father, cupboards with moldings in the form of acanthus leaves or the petals of a flower, bedheads carved with the shapes of poppies, marquetry work, rosewood bedside tables adorned with lilies or geometric art deco designs in noble oak or ebony, none of which anyone has ever asked me to make, and none of which I would have known how to make or even wanted to. So I haven’t even really been a carpenter. Ever since I abandoned art school (after all the sacrifices I’ve made, he said: I’ve given you the chance Germán never had, the chance to do what I never managed to do, later, I discovered this wasn’t strictly true — I was a substitute for Germán, and we both failed him, more fuel for his bonfire of resentments), my father never suggested we create something together, never taught me how to be my own man and become the kind of cabinetmaker who leaves behind him a few pieces of furniture that others can admire and enjoy. When I rejected his plan, he gave up on me altogether. And I gave up on myself. In his youth, my father did have aspirations, ambitions: he wanted to get a few rungs further up the ladder than his father, who had been a good cabinetmaker but, because he’d lived here and not in a big city, had lacked the opportunities to develop his skills. He had, nevertheless, left a few good pieces, some of them still in this house that has never been mine and in which, until recently, I lived like a resident in one of those old boarding houses, who’s snapped at if he uses too much water when he showers, if he turns on the heater or reads until late into the night with the bedside lamp on.