It was no easy task to count the number of river islands on the stretch of the Guadalquivir that adjoined the city. Some could be mistaken for small isthmuses. One September morning he walked to the dock carrying his canoe and took to the water. He spent several days getting the hang of his vessel, but once he had, he started to explore. There had been no rain for weeks. The river was very low; the water was still and smelled really bad. He skirted the islands with a mixture of anxiety and astonishment, without ever managing to take the canoe ashore. He wasn’t confident in his ability to make rapid maneuvers, feared that the shorelines might be muddy, that he would slip and his canoe would drift away. And the thought of having to swim back with his mouth tightly closed to avoid swallowing the putrid water scared him, as did the lush, brightly colored vegetation buzzing with insects and the layer of bird shit on the ground. A landscape he’d believed to be beautiful was no more than trees deformed by the weight of birds—or perhaps some disease—colonies of bugs, and shrubs rotted by the filth.

On his fifth day out in the canoe, he decided to explore beyond the bend in the Guadalquivir. Paddling south had the advantage of allowing him to keep the low rolling hills of the surrounding countryside in sight. The islets there were tiny, more rocky, and packed close together like a rash. He paddled laboriously around them; near the last one he found a dead body floating facedown in the reeds. It was a man, wearing only boxers; the skin on his back was covered in blisters the size of a hand. He didn’t know if they were caused by exposure to the sun, which was still scorching in September, or immersion in the water. The river stank. He called the civil defense unit and some officers arrived in a boat too big to pass through the reeds. They had a canoe onboard; while an obese officer was getting into it, he paddled over to the boat and asked for permission to leave. He didn’t want to witness that dead flesh being dragged out of the water. He shrank at the thought of turning around to see fresh entrails being nibbled by fish.