As she walked, she turned back and looked at their footprints. The marks in the dry sand, shallow and imprecise. The marks in the wet sand, more detailed, reflecting the difference in their weights and sizes. They would all be erased soon and would go back to being part of the beach. Some sooner than others, but they would all disappear. When Josefa saw them she realized that everything she was experiencing with Fede was real. It sometimes happened that she had very vivid memories from when she was little that later turned out to be dreams or inventions, confusions of hers. There were two in particular. In the first one she was with her mother, and they were home alone at night. She woke up to some strange noises, and she called to her mother. Together they went into the living room, and in the darkness there they saw the thieves. They were hidden, crouched down under the dining room table, behind the sofas, the gas heater. There must have been four of them, and Josefa remembered seeing the outline of their black uniforms with the high collars of thieves, and how they seemed like children playing hide-and-seek. The other memory was of an afternoon she spent with her father. She couldn’t picture very well what they were doing, but at one point he’d told her that he had the power to disappear, and he went running to the bedroom. She followed him, but when she got there, he wasn’t there. She looked for him all over the room, and then all through the rest of the house, but she couldn’t find her father. Then she sat down in front of the mirror, and while she looked at herself and played at tracing the outline of her flat reflection, she came to the conclusion that her father had drunk a potion like in Alice in Wonderland, to shrink down to a tiny size and hide. The images of those memories were very clear in her mind, even clearer than others that actually happened. They had gradually lost their authenticity as she’d gotten bigger, when they no longer seemed logical or possible, and she had to force herself not to call them up.

But there were the footprints, two pairs for two people. Some the wind would erase, and others the sea. They wouldn’t be permanent, they would pass into oblivion like everything, and that made them real.

They went out until the water covered his chest and they let themselves be rocked by the calm sea. He hugged her from behind and sucked on her neck like the mollusks on the rocks all around them. “I’m in love,” he repeated. “I’m crazy for you.”