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whores disappear from my rearview mirror—at the bend in the road, their gesticulating figures have vanished behind the vegetation. The road surface (if you can call it that) is pure mud and full of deep potholes filled with rainwater. I advance very slowly. At the first intersection, I turn left along a dirt road just before you get to the river, or whatever you want to call that stretch of water which, like another half dozen or so similar stretches of water further north, forms the system of canals through which the lagoon flows into the sea. I park the car by the water’s edge, on the grassy bank. The pleasure I get from driving down these diabolical roads comes in large measure from knowing that I won’t meet any police—no civil guards or nature preserve police or environmental police—or even other fishermen or hunters: no one ventures down these dirt roads buried in scrub (the lagoon has been declared a nature reserve, but no one keeps watch over it or guards it: there’s no budget for that), and no one else knows the complicated grid you have to reconstruct each time you visit, given that it’s used less and less, and the people who once knew every inch of the area and kept the pathways reasonably clear have also disappeared. I’ve known this place for over sixty years. I’ve come here either alone or with Francisco, Álvaro, Julio, and lately, Ahmed. I’ve been coming here ever since my Uncle Ramón started bringing me when I was a child, once or twice a week, to hunt for coots, crakes, mallards or one of those ducks that we call mute ducks and the French call Barbary ducks, creatures that added a touch of highly valued protein to our stews, along with a bit of rice—the inevitable local vegetable—some spinach, a few potatoes, a handful of beans, some chard or a few cardoon stalks, protein that was considered a luxury at the market, although most country people, instead of eating what they caught, sold it to restaurants back then or to distributors who sent it off to the butcher’s shops in Valencia. The protein gleaned from the lagoon paid for the inferior protein and fat we bought in the market: bacon, offal, chorizo and black pudding.
    Go on, then, tell me how many varieties of potato you have in your country?
    Well, they say we have over a thousand, tuquerreña , pastusa , roja nariño , mambera , criolla paisa . You hardly know anything about my country really. On television, the only time Colombia gets a mention is when there’s an item about drug-trafficking or there’s been another massacre by some guerrilla group.
    I’ve known these paths for as long as I can remember. My uncle showed me how to use a shotgun when I was only eleven or twelve: children matured much earlier then; by the age of nine or ten, we were helping in the fields, on building sites, in workshops. The first shot I fired nearly knocked me off my feet and left me with a huge bruise on my shoulder. As you can imagine, I completely missed the target and turned to my uncle, red-faced with embarrassment. I thought he would make fun of me, but he didn’t laugh as I’d feared he would, instead, he tousled my hair and said: You have just acquired the power to take away life, which is a pretty pathetic power really, because if you had real power—the power nobody has—not even God, I mean who ever believed that business with Lazarus?—you’d be able to restore life to the dead. Taking life is easy, anyone can do that. They do it every day all over the world. Just read the newspaper and you’ll see. Even you could do it, take someone’s life I mean, although obviously you’d have to improve your aim a little (and then he did smile teasingly, the corners of his lively gray eyes etched with a web of delicate lines). Mankind may have constructed vast buildings, destroyed whole mountains, built canals and bridges, but we’ve never yet succeeded in opening the eyes of a child who has just died. Sometimes it’s the biggest,