While my mother used every argument she could to prevent my departure, my father said nothing. He’d silently watched my attempts at social integration, comparing them with the successes of my elder sisters, who at a young age had married white-collar workers, perfectly respectable men, and, as I had done during that trip to get water for my grandfather, I took advantage of his silence to keep quiet myself. He and I never talked. I don’t know which of us was to blame—I don’t even know if you can talk about blame here—but I always had the feeling that if I’d confronted him directly I would somehow have hurt him. The war had sent him a long way away without sparing him any of its well-known peculiarities. Nobody to whom a thing like that happens can return home exactly as he was before. In spite of his proud silence, it always seemed as if he was trying to make us forget something, perhaps the fact he’d come home a shattered man and had made us watch his big body writhing as the electric shocks shuddered through it. Anyway, that’s how he was, and when I was a boy I could never forgive him for his unheroic profession, his love of order, his excessive respect for inanimate things, not understanding what terrible destruction he must have witnessed to then set about repairing an old kitchen chair with infinite patience on the very day he came back from the war. And yet, even now, after almost thirty years, there’s still something of the soldier about him, the patience, the tendency to hold his head high, the habit of not asking questions, and even now, if he’d given me nothing else, I’ll never forget the fearlessness I felt as a boy walking by his side. Because, even now, the thought of my father’s stride is the one thing more than any other that immediately takes me back to my childhood, and even now, even in the green expanse surrounding me, I can return as if by magic to his side, remembering his soft, dusty stride, apparently impervious to fatigue, the stride of those long marches as a soldier, the stride that one way or another he’d somehow managed to bring back home with him.