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was before surnames existed. My father died the same day and I disappeared one year later. I fled from the family.
    It was very hard for me to understand why I had disappeared. What was so bad about me in this whole story? I loved my wife very much and back then life in Lucena was very easy. There were fruits in abundance, work for Jews and Muslims back then there were no Christians in Lucena everything was abundant.
    An inexplicable force took me again and again to the mountains and to the sea, to solitary places where one could be alone for a long time. Then I fell ill with a bad fever, I didn’t eat at all for a week, weakened, only someone, he or she, moistened my lips with a bit of water, persons I could not see and who I never saw again. And one morning I awoke again feeling like a twenty year old. At first the same thing happened every twenty years, later the periods were thirty and forty years. But for the last sixty it hasn’t happened again. That is why I look older than I have ever looked, which means it is the end. I know, nobody can live more than a thousand years because a thousand years is a day for God. This is something I have learned on my own so I must tell you my story.
    Look at me, Shmuel, look at me. These are the hands of a millennium. This is his head and his skin. That is what a millennium looks like. Look at me, don’t look at the sea. The waves deceive. They come and go as if man did not know about suffering and death. The sea is the great deceiver. You think it is nature and beauty but we are nature, man, because we choose, the sea doesn’t. The sea is like a corpse because it can’t choose the stormy days but we, like a dove, can provoke storms, earthquakes, wars and epidemics. And with the passage of time we can damage more and repair more. Look at me Shmuel, my descendent, look at me. It is I, the grandfather of your grandfather. The one your father talked about so much you got tired of listening. I am Abraham Benzimra who in 1866 left Tetuán and went to Brazil, leaving his wife with three sons and two daughters, he who never wrote a letter and who never returned. It was the time to disappear from the family and to return like had been done so very many times. What would have been said about this old man who looked thirty when he was already one hundred, who had married three times and had dozens of children? Surely they would have thought me a witch and they would have burned me alive. Now they would not burn me alive. Shmuel, my descendent, now they would lock me into a secret laboratory to study me like they did with a friend of mine not long ago because he was weakened by love of a woman and told her the story. He was only three hundred forty years old, and for that reason I haven’t told anyone until today, perhaps in part, but never the whole story, as I will tell you during the next seven days. Or, at least what I remember.
    I know that death is approaching because now for months my hands have hurt me even though nothing has happened to them. My joints hurt. If you want, you can write it all. You can do whatever you please.
    The sea! Oh the sea! This little sea, seven wars and pirates. Once I signed up with a pirate ship and with them we robbed the English, the French, Portuguese and the rest. The Strait of Gibraltar was the easiest place for those robberies. I loved the sea but it never returned my love. I lost my family in the sea, in the waves and in the people’s fanaticism.
    Yes, I left Sevilla with my only son who had not converted to Christianity, Moshé, in 1391 from Sevilla to Málaga and from Málaga to Morocco, to Tetuán which at that time was a city of pirates. We claimed we were Muslims to avoid the misfortunes from the world around us. Very soon he became the most famous pirate of the region, and the favorite of King Abd-Allah. That was until the king died and the new king, Muhammad found out that he was a Jew and sank our ship.