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dumping ground for any defective material. Everyone knew about it and yet it never occurred to anyone to report it. Bernal went entirely unpunished. Just like his father, although he was apparently more civilized than his father. I’m not joking. In the 1940s, his father, who owned a few fishing boats, used to get rid of the occasional awkward corpse by putting it in a boat, tying a stone around its neck and then dropping it over the side into the vast, merciful Canal de Ibiza, where the waters separating Spain from the island are at their deepest: you find the best prawns and the best red tuna there, the kind that they say is going extinct. A corpse is organic matter, nutrients. The sea washes everything clean or else drives it out or gobbles it up, purifies with iodine and saltpeter, uses and recycles: one assumes the water there is healthy, not like the lagoon, which is always viewed by the people living nearby as an unhealthy, fetid place, stagnant water that can’t be trusted, liquid that grows warm and putrid in the spring sun and is only washed clean again when the first cold drops of rain fall in the autumn. The sea cleanses and oxygenates, the lagoon rots—like wars, police stations and prisons. They rot you, don’t they, Dad? They stink. Lagoons don’t get a very good press: fever, malaria, filth. The Romans drained lakes like this for reasons of health and economy, I’ve seen it on TV documentaries: Rome was surrounded by infectious swamps, like our own dear marsh, beads in the malarial necklace of the Mediterranean, a marshy chain scattered along the coast; until very recently, farmers, with their hunger for arable land, have always systematically drained all the lakes in the area. The novelist Blasco Ibáñez described the process, which nowadays is considered highly prejudicial to the environment, but thanks to which a lot of people managed to make a living here. Anyone who hasn’t read the novel is sure to have seen the TV series. I’ve read the book: the edition my grandfather bought before the war must still be knocking around in the house somewhere (we saved half a dozen or so of the books from one of the boxes my grandmother buried, I don’t think there can be many more than that in the whole house), and I watched the series they showed a few years back. The seashore has never been a hospitable place and, apart from a few promontories, it remained deserted until a few decades ago, when they started building wherever they wanted. In Misent, for example, there are housing developments right on the beach with names like La Laguna, Las Balsas, Saladar or El Marjal, whose inhabitants all complain that their houses get flooded with the onset of the autumn rains. But what sensible person would think of buying a place in a development with a name like that? The names of the places retain the memory of what they were. Lagoons. Quagmires. Ponds. Bogs. Salt pans. My father felt a particular scorn for people who bought houses and apartments in areas reclaimed from the lagoon. In fact, he scorned all those who arrived in the area drawn by the call of the sea. Lazybones. Adventurers. Speculators. The coast is an evil place, he used to say. The sea either washes up or attracts garbage, and only the scum remains. It’s always been like that: conmen, cardsharps, thugs. Although now that the human animal has become the least protected species, the ecologists probably consider what Bernal Jr. did as less forgivable than what his father did, because the worst sin has always been to destroy the eternal (no sin committed against the Holy Spirit can ever be forgiven) and for our materialistic society the eternal is no longer God, which means that the human body doesn’t merit the respect it once enjoyed when it was deemed to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, no, now the great shrine of the divinity is nature: impregnating water and mud with asphalt roofing felt—bituminous matter, glass fiber, carcinogenic