The following day I took the car before Ismael had time to notice. The fleshy visor covering putrefying food didn’t stop him from eating a breakfast of toast and all the sausage at the buffet, then polishing off a lunch of garlic potatoes with a pan of limpets. I’d think about leeches as I watched him chew the tough flesh of mollusks that were so unappreciated on the mainland, and which, when raw, looked just like Ismael’s infected gum. I drove to Timanfaya to walk barefoot; there were hardly any tourists there at that time in the afternoon. I sat at the base of a small crater; afterward, I walked for an hour without losing sight of the car, which I’d pulled off the road for fear of a police car passing. Although, to be honest, I’d yet to see a single police officer. Neither my urban nor rural senses worked in Timanfaya, so I didn’t know where to focus my worries. Some of the volcanoes formed rock corridors; in addition to fossilized plants, I found the remains of things that had once lived in the ocean. When the sun began to go down, I sat on the hard sand. Then I saw them.

After ten days of watching Ismael dip those slimy marine creatures into green sauce there was absolutely no doubt. Perhaps if I hadn’t found them repulsive, I’d have mistaken them for mussel shells, or fossils that hadn’t been engulfed by lava, because they only just showed above the gray and strangely iridescent tegument of a terrain that—and I swear this is true—at midday looked like the sea. I was lying flat on my stomach to hear the silence of the dry lava, the peacefulness of the cones, the dead calm that made me think of imminent eruptions. I started scraping at the earth with my fingertips and pieces of rock; what I found were the remains of limpets, as if all the restaurants and hotels tipped the shells in the park. The sea was too far away to account for their presence. Rather than marine dwellings or pieces of beach-themed jewelry, I’ve always thought of shells as skeletons. The souvenir stores at seafronts, with their tellina and conch shells, seemed more to me like bone traders. When I put one of those miniature crypts to my ear I don’t hear the sound of the sea, but the spirit of the mollusk, its sticky soul slithering over the nacre.