'You've come,' I said, far from the lobby. He opens the door to the fence and begins to look around like he expects a dog's greeting to arrive in the fight. ‘I live alone, quiet,’ I told him. I've waited still, leaning on the white wall, to keep my arms wrapped in my chest towards him. He approaches and approaches, and I'm suddenly in his arms. These thin arms that I still only put in my memories have elongated around my trunk, impacting my left hand over my belt.

When we have split up, Irene’s extensive wise smile has not covered the avalanche of wrinkles and eyelashes: they have been stacked on his skin every day of the last few years. He carries his dark lips, in the same purple as he reminded him, even though in the photos of recent times I have seen them red. The contrast gives it a ghostly shape under the sun, but in the end I've found his eyes, that celled blue.

_{* * * * * * * * * * *}

‘Here you will sleep’, I told him, beaten more than expected, with his arm stretched in open wood door. The jar of the wheels of the suitcase on the ground, an indifferent boy's march that knows I want.

‘Thank you,’ he told me when he got to bed. He's looked at me with a fallen eyelid, opening his mouth a little straight, as I expected. Two minutes have come and he has repeated the thanks for the third time.

‘There’s no reason,’ I told him again before pulling the grip.

Irene leaves the room and enters through the door adjacent to the bathroom, in a slow step, neceser in the hand. On her return, she raises her head and looks at me, placed in the living room against the blue grey wooden closet. He just touched the red hair, now the strands wrapped in a needle are more defined. I would do it in front of the mirror until it conformed to the third or fourth attempt.

‘Martina’, he told me, as if I had to draw my attention, weighty. ‘The house is beautiful.’

_{* * * * * * * * * * *}

"Can we walk then?" ', asks me while I return the key in the lock.

‘Yes, if you don’t mind walking for half an hour,’ I’ve responded by turning it around. ‘We can take a taxi to come back, no matter what’.

It's three or four meters from Nigane in front of the house, and when it moves its head to study the area, it momentarily slows down the movement to keep the angle that catches me.

‘The orange tree and… the olive tree, right?’ told me, looking at two wide trees of branches surrounding the path it has been taking out.

‘That’s it,’ I said. After moving along with the trees, he has stayed next to the second and I follow him automatically, after it I found my body.

He stops under a yellow branch and extends his hand. 'What do you have? ', ask, turning the neck towards me.

‘He’s sick,’ I’ve responded, leaning on the trunk. He's gone back a few steps to get closer and he's posed his arm in the place where the wide branch was born, near me. I've noticed the beginning of a spark in the gut, a reminder of a cow's knot. Another one below, under the abdomen.

The inertia pulls me from my wrist; I've held my breath, all of a sudden too conscious of all muscle. When he's lifted his gaze from his trunk, he's wet his lips and I can almost see his mouth looking for breathing. The chest swells. But it's hot and I haven't made any effort to move, clenching my teeth, even when Irene has taken his arm to caress the skin of the tree up and down. She's always been moderate, discreet, hypothetical. It stays a few centimeters away.

_{* * * * * * * * * * *}

‘I’ve resumed teaching in this last quarter,’ he explained to me on my way to the city. ‘I’ve been off for almost two years. But now I’ve come back with more enthusiasm.” I cannot keep the focus on his melodic speech; I lose the thread and as if I had not understood it, I have to ask him what it meant. I don't mind asking a lot anymore.

‘A. Why do you go down?’

‘It’s been a hectic time. I was found to be hyperthyroidism. I struggled to cope with the diagnosis, although that in turn explained the instability of the mood'. Play with the handle of the white fabric bag. ‘It’s rare to have your own emotional problems and suddenly have to face a technical, objective issue. I think I once thought I was in my hand to change my situation. But at the same time, I didn't. I drowned in the problems I've chosen.' The surrounding field changes its focus intermittently from the buildings that are replacing it. ‘Now it’s easier to relativize. But the limits are there.'

‘Oi. Sorry,’ I told him, unable to formulate anything other than to say.

‘Forgive, I’ve spoken too long,’ he starts again by heading his head towards the earth. ‘I don’t know why I told you all this. Nobody knows.'

‘Lasai.’

‘And you, how are you? How has the city taken you?’, he asked me, without being able to completely escape from the strangulated tone of the previous speech.

‘OK. Before, indeed, I lived near here’, I have indicated with my hand the direction towards the north. ‘But when I got more hours, I moved to my current home. I bought it at a reduced price and I made the repair myself. It's still not great, but it's enough. And it gives me what to do.’

‘We’re going to be back in college, so,’ he says.

My answer has been a sound that can be affirmative. He has been silent, it seems that the thread he has offered me awaits me.

_{* * * * * * * * * * *}

After eight o'clock we arrived in the city, but the heat of the month of June has not stopped. The white walls of the houses recreate an inevitable light, the verb that changes language sounds like summer. It is a summer that I have only known in Andalusia, which gives the sweat of oranges to the last fingers of spring jasmine, and which only keeps the nights that are the second days.

Irene's leather sandals sound from time to time on an irregular rock ground, leaving behind the river bank, the noise makes room along the humidified rumor of the city.

"Do you have a lot of friends here? ', asks me, turning the sunglasses towards me.

‘What you call a lot…’

'Are they local? ', has changed the question by keeping the melody.

I've told him that most of them have been known through the University: once with a conference or a one-time assignment, a colleague, a former student.

‘Sure, you’re young,’ she responds to the latter.

I haven't been able to hold laughter, it's become an audible sound from my nose. The possible answers have gone through my head, I let them go. ‘There’s no such custom of militancy here,’ I’ve changed the subject. ‘Some feminist group, some occupied space. I have a friend there, but I have stayed on the periphery’, I explained. Words have left a mark on my mouth: renunciation has led me to speak too long.

‘Oh, you will still have become the Lorcarrago in these five years, right?’, he told me when we arrived at the observatory of San Nicolás. Small groups of tourists surround us here and there. From the end of the stairs he has travelled the way to the edge of the plaza, walking his hand above the wall as looking for something on the surface of the stone.

You're already sitting on the wall when I've come to the edge of the observatory. My feet have taken weight on every step, it has taken me a long time to go behind them, with my head very difficult to correct.

When I sat next to him he has bent his neck towards me, among the new wrinkles he has been given the usual marks by the smile. His eyes have gone up and down in my skin and the silence has become too moist all of a sudden. I want you to hide the denture too white, to stop the sweat layer that's reaching my surface. But I have nothing to say, words don't laugh at me. I have the leather too hard under the sun that has begun to land, the shapes of bones occupy me a place above the muscles. I've been deflating from time to time, since we've started walking well.

‘You’ll see in the Alhambra, right?’ I asked him. I have spoken words to silence on the ramp. That language similar to that of lack of speech is lost.

‘Yes, a couple of times. I last came with Rafa, about three years ago.’ His name has been pronounced quickly with an indifferent arrow tone. He's twisted his head a little bit. He's not going to say more.

‘How it has to be to live in a house of this kind’, I continued. ‘Move from the winter house to the summer house and absorb as much beauty as possible from the gardens without more care’.

For a moment, think. ‘It would be depressing.’ The legs have expired on the wall and leaned in the hands, pulling the trunk back. ‘Too long to think.’

‘Don’t think it’s learned,’ I’ve told him in the eye.

‘Or you dodge,’ it ends.

No one is doomed to mix all the wires we want to undress further, I could say. But maybe it's not. Perhaps you do not intend to change if it is the conviction. It's not worth it.

‘I left it with Rafa, you know,’ he tells me. ‘About two years ago’. He's put his weight on his left arm, next to me, and he's lifted his chin, looking underneath his eyelashes. This was what I used to be, which would make my chest feel beaten up in the face of this information.

The blue eye is too sharp, they make me change my gaze towards the brown-orange tile that gives the view and the sea of pure walls, where Irene's cold figure is an anachronistic manifestation that clashes with the environment. I once thought paradise would be something like this, a strange landscape that treated this body as fragile as perverse next to mine and as one the two. But he's stuck in the past, and I'm one more element of the picture. And we're both strangers.

I would like to say that I do not continue, that I do not want to know, that I cannot leave the burden of your voice to know the background in the flesh. ‘I didn’t know,’ I ended up saying the voice was unstable. He moves away in the subsequent silence.

On one occasion we have decided to look for a place where the two get up and dine: a restaurant that mimics the Islamic architecture analyzed from the observatory. We've sat inside and asked for food similar to what teenagers in the plaza eat with plastic forks, at a double price for the clay dishes.

We sat on each side of the table, looking at each other. He proposes asking them to eat to share. When the waiter drinks, he only calls Irene the guapa. He has inspired me deeply and looked at me, I see his neck muscles tense. I have offered him a smile without showing any teeth. He doesn't know that they don't tell me years ago, he doesn't know when I cut my hair, when I stopped dressing.

When the worker leaves, he turns his lips. He has his hand stretched out on the table, cut into irregular strokes.

When they have brought us the food, it has slowly brought the small pieces out into the white and blue dish in front of us. The elbow allows him to approach his trunk while the right hand is still nailing the plate on a fork, but when he realizes it he does it again, cyclically, like a vagabond that extends over time. On the edge of the table in front of me, I have my arms, my fingers actuate the seam on the edge of the slow.

‘You bring a lot of quotes here, or what?’ asks me, pointing out the environment with your eyes. Fatigue starts to take a voice, loses strength from the playful spike of its tone.

'A lot? No’, I replied. ‘I’m changing, I don’t believe in one formula.’ I do a wound inside the mouth, actuating the flesh between the teeth, but I try to prolong the breaths.

‘It’s not a bad place,’ he judged. She wants an eight-year-old girl, spreading the intricacies of her words with obvious suggestions, reddening her cheeks.

‘There’s nothing I worry about very much,’ I told him.

‘Because you don’t have to worry about arranging scheduled appointments.’

A gesture of laughter came to me before I could think. I've raised my eyebrows, looking at the empty tables in the area. ‘That’s what you see me, right?’

When I have receded, my chest goes up and down, the clenching of my teeth has pulled out small hills on the edges of my jaw.

‘I’m not the one who accompanied me with anyone, you know,’ I told him.

He's rotated a fork between his fingers. 'And where's that left now? ', he said, with a voice pulled out of his throat. I too could ask that question. But he doesn't seem to be able to answer. I've been quiet.

‘You’ve stayed in me, listen?’ he says, and I’m listening but I struggle to relate words to their meanings. I've addressed a little bit of pain that I notice when I deform the skin of the palm of my hand between my fingers.

'What do you want? ', it's come out to me. The eyes have become very large, I have consciously pushed the piece from the base of the castle and now I am seeing that the whole building is falling dry.

_{* * * * * * * * * * *}

‘Too many things,’ he says.

Then, the air of the class has become something tangible, as if everyone we could say and ask were swimming around us.

When we have gone out without asking for dessert the sun has gone and I've loved to take the hen's story from the dry night. I just open my mouth to say that we have to go from ‘here’ and ‘from’, and Irene looks to the sky, help the children who play at night around the terraces, to the tourists who seem comfortable in disorientation.

‘You see many stars,’ he says that we are leaving inhabited streets to get out of the city center. ‘To be a city.’

“What time do you have the talk tomorrow?” I ask. I'm walking with my hands in my pockets looking at the sand and gravel floor.

‘It’s at four, but I have to be half an hour before.’

‘OK, I’m going to take you,’ I say.

‘I take the taxi, quiet’. Now it has a monotonous language.

‘Well, are you staying at my house and going up and down in the taxi? I'm going to take you. I will stay to listen’, I said, with a half-smile, with the raised front. I can imagine all the way we have before, and I see down in my gut all the looks of the previous hours and the wrinkled lips, as if I had swallowed every single time I've given him. But I've taken a few steps and he's grabbed me in the forearm to turn towards him until the two are facing each other. I've been shocked by the warmth of her touch on my skin.

His clear eyes are two wells in the darkness of the field, a hole in the middle. ‘Thank you for everything, Martina,’ she tells me. He's shaking and I want to ask him if he's really grateful, if by opening the door of my house I've closed everyone else. He's turned his face towards me, he's got the whole crystal. The pockets have been small in my hands, they want to look for the new relief of their cheek. I could kiss him now, try to pull out another self's dream. Martina in love, student Martina, too young, who was lost in the seam of Irene's explanations, in the gestures of his hands, in the smiles he secretly sends in a full class.

But what, then? Would we lie down? It's enough to lie down on my own memories. I've taken a step back, he's released my arm. The moment has broken and we turn again to look forward.

_{* * * * * * * * * * *}

When we get home, I can't tell you how long we're walking. I've got my head too light and I've suddenly sat on the lounge couch.

Irene has come from behind me to bend over and lay the humble lips between the cheeks and ears. ‘Good night’ tells me. I've been quiet. There is again the famous impulse of the head back.