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conversation.
    'It must be this humidity, it "dilates" the brain. That's what Barcelo says.'
    'It must be something else. Is anything worrying you, Daniel?'
    'No. Just thinking.'
    'What about?'
    'The war.'
    My father nodded gloomily and quietly sipped his soup. He was a very private person, and although he lived in the past, he hardly ever mentioned it. I had grown up convinced that the slow procession of the postwar years, a world of stillness, poverty, and hidden resentment, was as natural as tap water, that the mute sadness that seeped from the walls of the wounded city was the real face of its soul. One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep. That evening in early summer, as I walked back through the sombre, treacherous twilight of Barcelona, I could not blot out Clara's story about her father's disappearance. In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbours, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk to Ciudadela Park in the morning, and then, in the afternoon, make someone disappear in the dungeons of Montjuic Castle or in a common grave with no name or ceremony. Going over all this in my mind, it occurred to me that perhaps the papier-mache world that I accepted as real was only a stage setting. Much like the arrival of Spanish trains, in those stolen years you never knew when the end of childhood was due.
    We shared the soup, a broth made from leftovers with bits of bread in it, surrounded by the sticky droning of radio soaps that filtered out through open windows into the church square.
    'So tell me. How did things go with Gustavo today?'
    'I met his niece, Clara.'
    'The blind girl? I hear she's a real beauty.'
    'I don't know. I don't notice things like that.'
    'You'd better not.'
    'I told them I might go to their house tomorrow, after school, to read to her for a while - as she's so lonely. If you'll let me.'
    My father looked at me askance, as if he were wondering whether he was growing old prematurely or whether I was growing up too quickly. I decided to change the subject, and the only one I could find was the one that was consuming me.
    'Is it true that during the war people were taken to Montjuic Castle and were never seen again?'
    My father finished his spoonful of soup unperturbed and looked closely at me, his brief smile slipping away from his lips.
    'Who told you that. Barcelo?'
    'No. Tomas Aguilar. He sometimes tells stories at school.'
    My father nodded slowly.
    'When there's a war, things happen that are very hard to explain, Daniel. Often even I don't know what they really mean. Sometimes it's best to leave things alone.'
    He sighed and sipped his soup with little relish. I watched him without saying a word.
    'Before your mother died, she made me promise that I would never talk to you about the war, that I wouldn't let you remember any of what happened.'
    I didn't know how to answer. My father half closed his eyes, as if he were searching for something in the air - looks, silences, or perhaps my mother - to corroborate what he had just said.
    'Sometimes I think I've been wrong to listen to her. I don't know.'
    'It doesn't matter, Dad___'
    'No, it does matter, Daniel. Nothing is ever the same after a war. And yes, it's true that lots of people who went into that castle never came out.'
    Our eyes met briefly. After a while my father got up and took refuge in his bedroom. I cleared the plates, placed them in the small marble kitchen sink, and washed them up. When I returned to the sitting room, I turned off the