When I was informed of the disappearance of a friar from the monastery of Estibaliz, I only confirmed the suspicion in the newspaper: It was Josh who, without habit, went for a walk with an empty sweater and was caught by the night and the ice... And from Estibaliz my mind went to Ataun: one day my mother and daughter set out from the remote neighbourhood of Aia in Ataun to the Ordizia fair, taking some vegetables and eggs in the donkey; and seeing a large church and houses by the side of the road, my mother said to the little girl: “This neighborhood is San Gregorio dun, and next is San Martín zagon”; the daughter was even more surprised at Lazkao, with its palaces and churches, and soon cried: “Mother, sea, sea!”; but the sea was still far away, and her mother told her that Oria was a fiery river: "Well, we've come to Billapranka, we'll see the main square now," and the curious daughter asked her mother if there were any more villages, and she replied: “Yes, Billapranka and then Tolosa zagon, and then San Sebastián, great uri. And then the sea...” On his return he would explain that the children were also taken from the market in Ordizia in a small basket.

It was in this not so distant tenor that the world ended in the sea that Joseph was born, precisely in the house of Ergon, in the neighborhood of San Gregorio, of Sarriartegara. In his childhood, he collected the tales he had heard while working at night in his book The Old Accounts, and on the cover was a photograph of a peasant, so I imagined the generous man who later received me in Estibaliz: “The farmer? Of course I am. I clean around here. I also have a chicken coop with a thousand chickens...” But he was different: Maddi Ariztia’s Amatto’s Harvest book features a man who was in charge of telling stories, who walked from house to house and called him ‘Ixtorio erraile’. That's what I've always thought of Josh, a gorilla listener and an extraordinary error, on top of the shelf. And next to the collections of Azkue or Barandiarán, also of San Gregorio, Sara, I have carefully preserved the precious books of both Ariztia and Arratibel (the latest edition was edited by Miel Anjel Elustondo, together with illustrations by Antton Olariaga).

Perhaps war may be one of the synonyms of the night, and that atmosphere of storytelling was interrupted by war, according to Jox. Moreover, he began to write these accounts when the chief of the monastery was imprisoned, stimulated by Joxema San Sebastián Latxaga. “I didn’t have a drip fountain that gave stories like water; no, I had a small well that was emptied and that was it.” But it was precisely Elustondo who later collected the last honey drops from that well and was in charge of publishing them (The Golden Bed of Witches, The Terrible... on the other hand, on a CD of the book The Golden Key, we can hear Txomin Ipurdi in the voice of Josh).

The war extinguished Josh's world. And the lights. Every fall, I used to go back to Ataun to spend a few days. “I walk home from St. Gregory after dark, and I think to myself: this one here is a witch’s place, this one...”

But Josh was surprised at how easily the children left the house at night. “Today there is light in everything, but then...” As he grew older, Joseph was supposed to disappear at night, but in the dark he would not be alone: He was accompanied by Txomin Ipurdi, Mari Xor, the two brothers of the Den of Thieves... And though he was found strangely alive, and later killed, perhaps he stayed that night forever, in the sea of tales that he considered a well. It happened, however, that in this excessive tenor of clarity, hardly anyone noticed the magnitude of the loss.