In the airport bookshop I saw the cover of a book called The Principle of Happy Families. A typical stock image: a man giving a child a piggy-back, a woman leading a girl down the beach by the hand. All four are smiling. The smiles are obviously at the photographer’s request. It’s clear they’re not blood relations.

There are a lot of children on this flight. The parents have a kind of camaraderie; they lend each other toys, share food, chat across the aisle. Perhaps in a different place this wouldn’t happen. I wonder if these young couples, these families on their way to the beach, also long for a moment or a life like the cover of that book. Is that their idea of happiness? I’d like to know.

No, not really. They’ve just given me some savoury biscuits and I’m reading a really good book. I’ve learnt that Saint John of the Cross was so short that Saint Teresa of Ávila called him half a friar. Like Lautrec, whose short stature meant he introduced himself as ‘half a bottle’. The dwarf on the block could be half a bottle of absinthe, especially when he wears a top hat.

There’s a Mexican wrestler who has a sidekick, a dwarf in a colourful costume. That half-wrestler apes his companion’s moves, like a kind of comical shadow. I feel like the worst of this country’s political class are a comical shadow. A half-bureaucracy, a half-bottle unable to contain the violent sea.

21

21

We’re on a beach near Tulum. We went for a long walk; I haven’t had a conversation like that with my brother for ages. I’d really missed it. The sea, at once both deep and light, seems to encourage extremes. The sea that sinks ships and the sea that tosses a nappy on its surface is the same. The same as ever. And yet, there are no two identical combinations of waves or two identical moments. It’s the repetition, like a ritual of waves. And that old melody in the background. Oh, I love how its whistling messes up my hair.

We talked about Jonás, and Ana, and our friends. About his girlfriend and the problems they’re having. About work, about the things we’d like to do. We remembered a trip to the beach when we were children. We talked about some things I remember, and some things he remembers, as if we were playing cards. I told him, in detail, about the accident. He told me, in detail, how it was for him, being so far away, the phone calls to our parents, what was going through his head. We cried on the beach, and we laughed, then we went to a palm-roofed shack for some beers.