My best friend had a house in the village of Robledondo, up in the mountains, about thirty miles from Madrid, and she offered it to us for the party. At the sham wedding shower there were no bee antenna headbands or penis tiaras; I just had some T-shirts printed with a photo of Ismael and I dressed as bride and groom. We toasted the Photoshop montage with white Rueda wine. I’d done a few trial runs using virtual suits and gowns, pasting our heads on like pinballs that fit any collar or neckline. At the very last minute I changed the venue of our vacation. We’d planned to spend the time in a friend’s London home, but before I could buy the e-tickets, I saw an offer for three weeks in Lanzarote. Something gave way without any effort, and I went to the travel agency to put our names down; that evening I unfolded a map of the island on the table; almost everything was black: volcano craters like birds’ nests and sparsely scattered towns. Ismael tensed; not that he was against the idea, it was more like a hunter that has spotted its prey in the distance. He said he’d always wanted to visit Lanzarote, but that you couldn’t tell what color the island was from that map. We switched on the lamp and the ceiling light; neither offered us any further enlightenment. We didn’t look on the internet either, preferring to live with the uncertainty of the map I’d been given at the travel agency, in which—according to Ismael—the island looked like an invertebrate. And we had things to sort out; there was a ton of Spanish omelet, sausage, and bowls of tabouli in the fridge, and we needed to take the seafood out of the freezer: the fishmonger had told us that the king prawns should be defrosted overnight. We also had to get to Robledondo early to organize the tables, but for me all that seemed a long way off, and I think the same was true for Ismael. In front of us, hanging from a set of coat hooks, were our costumes, which López was sniffing at that moment, his tail wagging. We’d decided that it would be best not to put them in the closet. As if we’d forget them! Even though my mind wasn’t really on the wedding, I told Ismael that we could have gotten married for real; he responded that when that event occurred our friends would come to the party thinking it was a joke. The sham wedding suddenly seemed an absurdity, not at all what I’d intended; I suspected then that its only objective was to give me an excuse for something I’d been longing to do for ages: go to an island and gaze out over the ocean from the shore. I scrutinized the map again and it looked to me like a drawing of a leech. Ismael had been right to compare it to an invertebrate. I felt freed from my bones, plunged in ancient, placid forms of life.