How old am I? Four or perhaps five? I’m sitting on my uncle’s knee, watching as he folds the sheet of paper and hands to me, like a lavish gift, the possibility of being the one to put it in the envelope, then stick on the stamp that will allow this newly written business letter to reach its destination: I can feel again the tremor of excitement as I run my tongue over the sickly, gluey surface and give the stamp a good thump with my fist so that it’s firmly stuck down; once that’s done, I gaze, entranced, at the colored design. I wish I could keep it for my collection, but these stamps are all destined to leave, to disappear into the mouth of the box in which I myself post the letters. Whenever he sends a letter, he always lets me lick the stamp with its sickly taste of glue, and then thump it down firmly with my fist. I don’t like dull stamps bearing the face of some old man — now I know they were politicians, writers, painters, musicians or scientists — but sometimes they’re brightly-colored and represent flowers, birds or flags. At night, I can feel Leonor nibbling my ear in the darkness of the movie theater, the damp, moving warmth of her tongue tickles the cartilage, and that warm, vibrant, viscous feeling spreads like a shudder through the rest of my body and makes me catch my breath. Adrift in the night are old photos, me and my classmates standing outside the school, or me sitting alone at my desk with a pen in one hand and the map of Spain on the wall behind me. Photos of her, of Leonor: in one she has long, shoulder-length hair. As the poet says: We sing what we have lost. She’s wearing a very short skirt, in a pale fabric, and a floral print blouse; the top two buttons are undone to reveal a hint of cleavage. In another, she’s with her father — she gave me that photo because I told her it was the one in which she looked the prettiest; her father: dark shirt, large hands as hard and stiff as if covered by a carapace, a man of the sea. I burned those photos. They’re only there in my head now, where they will remain for just a few hours more. In my memory, Leonor’s brothers are also hard, sinewy youths, I still see the older one occasionally, he’s a fisherman in Misent, like his father; I remember the other two wearing overalls: they would leave the garage with them on, I remember them walking home or standing chatting in the local bar. Of the two, one died young, and the other opened his own business in Misent — apparently, later on, he bought my brother’s garage from my sister-in-law Laura after my brother died — and now he owns a car dealership, I remember them then as serious and compact, pure sinew: they hadn’t yet acquired their father’s opaque air, his breadth or weight. He reminded me of the French actor, Jean Gabin; the older brother, Jesús, the fisherman, has filled out since, grown heavier; the second brother, José, never reached the solidity to which he was predestined by his genes, because destiny cut short the evolutionary process — he died test-driving a car on the sharp bends of the road to Xabia; that was over thirty years ago now, his slender, muscular body lying, headless, next to the car, I didn’t see him dead, but others have talked about it hundreds of times in the bar, describing his death in detail; so many people claimed to have seen it that I ended up seeing it too, and can see it now: his decapitated body and the overturned car, its wheels still spinning. So much time has passed since then, and here I am, seeing these images in the dark, seeing Leonor, who always looked like a modern young woman, as if she belonged to a different family, she had a more urban beauty, as if, right from the start, she was destined to escape from here; she had, above all, a slightly affected vivacity: in another of those now non-existent photos, you can see it in her face, in the way the neck of her striped polo shirt — she looks like a petite urban sailor — reveals the soft skin at the base of her throat, her short hair, she’s a little sailor-girl straight out of a sewing magazine or a musical, and not the daughter of a fisherman, which is what she was; not the daughter of a boat-owner, but the daughter of a fisherman whose wages depended on how much fish he caught each day, the kind of people who formed a small, marginal population within Misent, or, rather, in one corner of Misent, because they lived right on the sea front, in small, crammed-together houses protected from storms by low dikes built parallel to the façades so as to shield the steps that led up to the front door on the upper floor, where they lived and had their furniture and any objects of value, because every year, come the autumn storms, the ground floor was flooded. I can see faces and bodies, as well as the old houses that were demolished years ago now, I can also see the sea, which I don’t think resembles today’s sea, something has changed, perhaps the color, no, that’s not possible, how could the color of the sea change? That’s absurd, but the sea does seem different. Alien. Faded. Perhaps my capacity to distinguish colors has changed. The marsh remains the same in its degradation, when I look at it now it seems identical to how I remember it; it smells the same. In my nightmare, it’s gradually taking on the form of a huge, dark hand that I can see from the air, as if I were riding on the back of one of those migrating ducks. The duck flutters its wings and shakes its back, as if trying to dislodge me and hurl me into that dark watery hand — that’s another night when I wake up, anxiously reaching for the light switch. It takes me a few attempts to find it. I grope around. I’m submerged in the dark water of the lagoon, the giant hand is squeezing me, until, at last, I find the switch. Only then do I relax, make myself breathe regularly and try to empty my mind, but I can’t. A while ago, I was the little boy dozing peacefully, lulled by the dull regular thud of the iron on the blanket covering the ironing board: the child closes his eyes and has a sense that this is true happiness, the warm, damp, soapy smell filling the room in which he lies drowsing while his mother does the ironing, the moment when his mother holds the iron close to her cheek to see whether the iron is hot enough, and soothed now by the light of the bedside lamp, I am the old man who closes his eyes and begins to breathe more easily because the woman is ironing by his side and singing to herself,