I’ve parked the SUV next to the water, climbed up the slight incline to the right that conceals the vehicle from view and, from there, I’ve been contemplating a landscape partially concealed by mist and by the smoke from the bonfires in the orchards, where they’ve been pruning the orange trees. The smoke lends a watercolor quality to the sunny winter morning: the greens of the past months have been replaced by yellows and coppery browns, the light has a quality that is, at once, delicate and sharp; it emphasizes the shapes of the distant buildings, making them seem nearer, just a stone’s throw away; it carves a chiseled line around the whitewashed walls of the huts — some of which still have brick chimneys — where the rice-growers on the edge of the lagoon store their agricultural equipment, including their irrigators. In summer and at certain times of day, the water takes on the earthy color of tea, but on this sunny winter morning, it’s an intense blue, in marked contrast with the dun-brown of the dry scrub and the reedbeds: the lagoon seems to have gone back to being a bay open to the sea, a status it lost centuries ago. Where it touches the water, the sand of the dunes glitters, becoming a multitude of shining particles, like gold, mica, silver. I’m aware of the subtle, stimulating vitality of the morning, a morning that gives one a sense that everything that is about to disappear is being made anew. Even I seem to have been infected by a youthful air that makes the whole situation utterly absurd. What am I up to? What am I about to do? The beauty of the place lends an unexpected slant to the whole situation, a sort of false euphoria that overlays the gloom into which I am about to plunge and that has been waiting in the wings. I walk along with a spring in my step, pushing aside the reeds that brush my face. The shifting wind — a cold, almost imperceptible mistral that seems to cut through the air like a cheese wire — mitigates the marshy smells, mingling or alternating the sickly aromas from the stagnant water with the salty pangs carried on the breeze from the nearby sea, and with the hushed breathing of the grass, a damp emanation from the night dew that is fast evaporating beneath the warm breath of the sun. Flocks of sparrows cross the sky in formations that look as if they had been drawn by a geometrician. A distant rifle shot rings out. Someone is shooting ducks or the wild boar that come down from the mountain to drink or to hide their litter among the reeds, although they usually only arrive as dusk is coming on. I’ve watched them at sunset with my Uncle Ramón. Next to the road, at the top of the dune that runs alongside it to the left, is a well. How often have I lifted the wooden lid as I’m doing now? As soon as I do, a moist exhalation rises up from within, I can see the wall thick with maidenhair ferns, I take the bucket down from its metal hook, throw it into the well and hear a watery splash as the bucket hits bottom. As I struggle with the rope, the pulley above my head creaks and, from down below comes the echoing slosh of water as it overflows the bucket each time I give a tug on the rope. The metal bucket emerges misted with the cold water, which I drink, scooping it out with my hands, which, in turn, grow numb and intensely red. I splash my face, feeling the shock of sharp crystals on my skin. This clear, cold water bears no resemblance to the slimy stuff you get in the lagoon. When we used to drink it or pour it over our heads on hot summer days, I was always astonished at how cool the well water was and it still surprises me that, despite the depth of the well, it’s completely untouched by the salt sea nearby. What limestone corridors does it follow? How did my uncle know that down there, beneath the marshy mud, was a layer of rock and, beneath that, flowing water: the knowledge of old country folk, of water diviners who have passed on their experience, but who also have a nervous system able or trained to pick up energies and vibrations that we never notice. The well connects with some of those underground rivers born out of the rain that seeps through the calcareous rock of the nearby mountains and that then follow their subterranean course for dozens of miles beneath the sea. There are places where a fisherman can throw a bucket into the sea and find fresh water to drink. Yet, all around me lies dark, boggy earth composed of thousands of years of rotten vegetation.
While your voice, Liliana, is drowned out by the contemporary racket — the future that is fast approaching and no longer includes me — they come back to me and occupy the space you have vacated: they return to perform their dance, Ginger and Fred. I see them dancing, hand in hand, leaping, turning. He’s wearing a top hat and, holding her hand above her head, he whirls her around like a spinning top, her skirt swirling about her thighs. They are, of course, taking an active role in the big closing number, just before the curtain falls to rapturous applause. They walk with the others to the front of the stage, and the whole cast bows to the audience. They’ve clearly rehearsed this beforehand, and the applause continues as the curtain rises two or three times more, before falling for the last time: she is like a piece of pale gauze, she looks as if you could easily pass straight through her, as the strange light from the spotlights does, impregnating whatever it is she’s made of, if, that is, the bluish fingers that take his hand, not mine, really are made of matter. They always appear to me together, as if they were just one person, they remind me of the Siamese twins joined by their beards who appeared in a fantasy film I saw as a boy, The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T., or the two inseparable detectives in the adventures of Tintin. But it isn’t true, they’re not joined together, and this fact could and does console me. The performance continues for Francisco as it does for me, a torrent of memories bursting through the floodgate, Leonor has escaped downstream, free, belonging to no one, and this grants her a redeeming weightlessness. As the nightmare ends, the scissors have snipped the couple in two, and Ginger has left Fred all alone, setting him unexpectedly adrift. She leaves without so much as a wave of the hand, without saying goodbye. Leonor, too, left without saying goodbye, without a word of warning as to what she was about to do (you should leave as well, she said, and I thought she was talking about the future, about her and about me too); after the operation, she vanished from Misent and, shortly afterward, I learned that she’d gone to live with Francisco in Madrid. I just couldn’t understand it. I didn’t know then that women have a sixth sense telling them where best to invest in what one might call the human futures market. They see in a man the germ of what he will become, a bit like the barely perceptible red speck in the yolk of an egg indicating that it’s been fertilized. Some people believe the maternal instinct activates that impulse in women, that eugenics search. Who knows? They came back for a few days and were seen together everywhere: the bars in Olba, the restaurants, cafés, the beach at Misent, various bank branches. Francisco was shown off like a trophy. She — the daughter of a fisherman — stayed at the Marsal house. She did not, as Francisco believed, leave Misent with a hook through her lower lip, but had gladly taken the bait that best suited her. You’ve caught me, but just wait and see how hard a catch I prove to be, how much I wriggle before you put me in that basket. The instantly acquired air of superiority (she proffered her cheek for me to kiss,