People have even started wars over salt.

For me, salt was my job. A job I enjoyed. I had had this job since Lou was born. I had to quit school then, bring home a paycheck—no two ways about it.

I had never thought I would stay there, in Argelès. Had always thought I would move away. Ever since I was young, I had envied the tourists who came and left, every single summer. They invaded the summers for those of us who were natives—taking over, eating enormous quantities of moules-frites, and sunning themselves to a crisp on the beach. Until they took their beach towels and hats and the smell of suntan lotion with them and went away.

But in recent years the tourists hadn’t come. The faucet was turned off. They disappeared. And I wanted to disappear too: from the empty restaurants, from the deserted shopping street, from the amusement park that slowly rusted away in the spray from the rising ocean, from the punctured inflatable castle and the overgrown miniature golf course.

They disappeared. I stayed. With Anna, with Lou, and over time, with August. In our crowded apartment by the harbor, where the salt water often forced its way into the cellar. But my job was a bright spot. The plant was located at the end of the esplanade. Before there had only been grassy dunes there, and a sun lounger rental business that had never managed to make a profit, because this was the windiest spot on the entire beach. But also the most beautiful, for those who took the time to notice and were able to ignore the wind.

I was lucky to get the job. Thomas was a friend of my father and a good boss. And my duties were fine. Noisy, but fine. We wore earmuffs to protect ourselves from the sound of the turbines. I worked with salt every day and liked the smell. But the objective was precisely to eliminate the salt.

We monitored operations as the seawater was channeled through the turbines, separating the salt from the water, osmosis in reverse. Fresh water ran out the other end, good, clear water.

“Desalination is the future,” Thomas used to say. And he told us about the facilities in other places in the world, in Florida and southern Spain, where there were many. These were the facilities that irrigated the ever-expanding desert.

But with each passing day, Thomas grew more and more worried, because the machinery at the plant was constantly breaking down. Parts fell to pieces—we couldn’t replace them. And we were unable to produce enough water. We were too small-scale, and it wasn’t cheap enough either. And when the desalination plants in Spain were leveled to the ground during the battles over the River Ebro, when our neighboring country became divided, he hardly slept at all any longer. He talked and talked about the EU, about the time when Europe was united. He talked about how everything was just disintegrating; every day he told me of a new conflict. Personally, I had given up paying attention a long time ago. I couldn’t bear to read the news. Because people were fighting everywhere, it seemed, north against south, the water nations against the drought nations. And there was also internal strife in some countries. As in Spain.