ay mi Rocío, manojito de claveles, she has a very clear, almost childish voice, capullito florecido, and beneath the blanket, all is safe and certain, warm as a nest, I can close my eyes now, because the woman with the child’s voice is protecting me, and a limitless future opens out before me. I can be whatever I want to be and achieve whatever I want to achieve. The old man splashing along the marsh paths feels a pressure in his chest that grows and thickens like the kefir the Turks use to ferment milk. I reject the old man’s anxiety. I want to be in those memories, to enjoy them before they vanish: my mother crossing my scarf over my chest before I set off for school. I can see the diaphanous light, the thin, fragile, winter light, like today; I can feel the cold air on the parts of my face not covered by my cap and earflaps and scarf; suddenly, it’s my father who’s at my side, watching how I hold the plane; he takes my hand so that I’m holding it properly, not like that, like this, he says, and his hand, that hand-cum-tool, grips mine like iron pincers, and his sour voice drills into my ear, but from behind comes my uncle’s voice, leave him to me, I’ll show him how to do it, and I immediately feel his large, warm hands, like a rough bird’s nest, enclosing mine. Simultaneously hard and soft. He never shouted at me, and I could count on the fingers of one hand the times he raised his voice above his usual grave, calm tone, my father never shouted at me either, or hit me, it was just that harsh voice, which seemed to emerge straight from the ill-shaven cheek that sometimes brushed roughly against mine. My father. Tomorrow, I’ll make him sit on the toilet until he has a proper bowel movement, and then I’ll give him a thorough wash. We must be clean, Dad. I wouldn’t want our trip to be sullied by such sordid details, by excrement and foul odors. We’ll go to the place where my uncle taught me to fish and to drink the clear water from the spring, the place where I caught just a glimpse of the thing we seem to have spent our lives looking for. It’s a shame, though, to poison the waters. Tomorrow: I’ll put on my latex gloves to remove his incontinence pad before turning on the shower, then take off his pajama top. I can’t help feeling a certain distaste when I press my bare chest to his. I sit him down on the stool, struggle to remove his pajama trousers, help him up, then remove the incontinence pad. The stench fills the bathroom. I put the pad in a plastic bag and tie it up before throwing it in the garbage can next to the sink. I hold his hands to help him walk. He’s in front of me now, I can see his back, I watch him stumble unsteadily forward and warily place his feet in the shower basin, excrement sliding down his thighs, I press lightly on his shoulders to make him turn to face me, all the time talking to him. He stares at me blankly, as if he didn’t understand what I was saying. He groans and moans and waves his hands about, rubbing his eyes with his fists: his shrunken chest, hard as a board, the wrinkled, bluish nipples of an exhausted mammal, his chest a cracked board that still has a troublingly youthful pallor. I have him in my grasp, I grab his shoulder, support him with one hand so that he won’t fall and, with the other, run the sponge over his face, I lift his chin, see his eyes sunk among the wrinkles and, in among the wrinkles, the whiteheads, like fossilized nodules of fat; I rub his chest, and I do so with unnecessary vigor, a vigor into which I channel all my anger and weariness at having to do this every single morning; I see the fuzz of hair barely visible beneath his navel, but which grows thicker around the pubis, gray hairs that immediately merge with the soap bubbles left by the sponge. I wash around his balls, and with the tips of two fingers, push back the foreskin of his penis and rub the place that rubbed against and entered my mother’s body, the topographical origin of me, the genesis of the lines on my face — partially disguised by fat — and the geography of age spots, more and more like his, on the backs of my hands. My father stares down at my gloved hand, with a look of astonishment that masks some unknowable emotion; I have the impression that the number of skin tags on his back and on his reddened buttocks — as wrinkled as those of a new-born baby — are increasing on a daily basis — and yet on his thighs and on the areas that are usually clothed and have never been exposed to the sun, the skin is surprisingly delicate, like marble, not newly carved Paros or Macael marble, but marble that has been exposed to the elements for centuries, exposed to the wind and the rain, which have worn it away and created a slightly porous texture, with a patina of curdled milk. I rub the rough sponge over his penis, a sponge that doesn’t so much rub as scrub. I begin gently, barely brushing the crinkled skin around his balls, but then rub harder, almost fiercely and his skin becomes covered in blotches, not red or pink, but a bluish or even intense iodine yellow, the color of stagnant or slow-flowing liquids, pent-up human fuel. The skin tags on my father’s body make me think of the ones that, for some time now, I’ve noticed appearing on the base of my neck, in my armpits and the inside of my thighs. If, when I take a shower, I look in the full-length mirror in the bathroom, I see reflected in the mirror over the wash-hand basin a mottled, milky-white back. My skin has the same deathly pallor as his. My brown hand stands out starkly against the white skin of this man rhythmically repeating the same feeble groans of complaint. I know it hurts, but I have to give you a thorough wash, I tell him as I continue scrubbing away at the areas that were covered by the incontinence pad. We have to wash away all the muck that gets lodged in the pores, so that you’ll be as clean as a new-born baby. If it was up to him, he would never bathe. Ever since he first began to lose his reason, even before he had the operation on his trachea, he’s developed a hatred of water; the struggle begins as soon as I start propelling him down the corridor to the bathroom. It’s sheer torture trying to undress him, he puts up a fierce resistance, folding his arms so that I can’t take off his pajama top and kicking his legs when I try to remove his trousers. He falls into a sulk each morning when I tell him it’s time for his shower. It seems that the slightest contact or pressure hurts him, and he complains when I grab his elbow and make him raise his arms so that I can wash his armpits. It hurts him to stretch up; his muscles — his dwindling muscles — are painful, like his joints. And yet, for his comfort, I always try to dress him in a bathrobe and in pajama trousers with a drawstring waist that are easy to get off; in summer, he wears just a light robe that reveals his blotchy legs. I look at his wrinkled hands, his gnarled, calloused fingers, with their irregular, deformed tips, the hands-cum-tools that have so often, pincer-like, gripped mine: the tip of his left thumb is missing, as is the tip of his right index and middle finger. The tip of my right thumb is missing too, I’ve also lost part of my left index finger, and my right index finger is somewhat squashed. Do you know any carpenter who hasn’t suffered these minor mutilations? The benign wounds of kindly St. Joseph’s peaceable profession. I look at those hands that were once strong and skillful, and stroke them chastely, as if I were simply washing them, but which I am, in fact, caressing. I suppress the urge to kiss them. Hands are no longer important, the concept of being good with your hands, once so respected, has vanished, things now are made by machines or made any which way by anyone — some better than others — you just have to see how clumsily the bar staff serves coffee or beer, sticking their thumbs in the empty glasses or the full plates. Waiters are incapable of carrying a tray properly. Hands no longer have the sacred importance they once had: they were necessary for work, but they also blessed and consecrated, hands were laid on the sick to heal them. When an artist, a writer, painter, sculptor or musician, was on his deathbed, a mold often used to be made of his hands. Used to be. Was. Were. Had. Everything is in the past tense. My mother is ironing, my uncle is making me a cart pulled by a little wooden horse, he lets me stick on the stamps and takes me to the fair. I see him at the shooting gallery, the butt of the rifle hiding part of his face. He’s aiming at a strip of paper on which is pinned a small tin truck. The festivals where colored Chinese lanterns were hung from the cables that hung above the dancers’ heads, the sort of lantern you could open out like an accordion and close again using the wooden sticks at either end, like flowers, and we children thought they were really beautiful. Bonet de San Pedro, Machín, Concha Piquer. the metallic clang of the bumper cars and the sparks crackling from the web of wires crisscrossing the ceiling. My mother is singing. Capullito florecido. The smell of burnt oil from the stalls selling fritters, the smell of caramel apples and cotton candy. The blaring music. The noise of the pellet guns used to knock over the ducks that circle endlessly round and round at the back of the stand, or to sever the strips of paper on which were pinned a pack of cigarettes, a bag of sweets, a tin car. The music that booms out metallically from the bumper cars, the equally metallic voice of the man announcing the tombola prizes. I don’t know if these things still exist, they probably do, and are more or less the same, although it’s been years since there was a fair in Olba. My hand holding my uncle’s hand as we did the rounds of all the stands. Can happiness be located so very far away? So far away in time, I mean; in terms of perspective, it’s neither near nor far, happiness is something one waits for, looks for, and just when you begin to tire of waiting for your rendezvous with happiness, it turns out that the owner of the place where you’ve been waiting is in a hurry to close (hey, don’t rush me, please, no bum’s rush, let me at least finish my drink). The door he’s pushing you toward is right there, and outside is the night you must face alone, the darkness the child is afraid of, and you really don’t want to go out into that blackness.