THE STORY OF RAFA AND DANI 14

You left in less than the time it takes to sing a rooster's song without direction. Or with a direction that wasn't geographical, but temporal: you walked to spend hours, to burn minutes, to turn dead time into distance traveled, as if the kilometers you walked with your legs could shorten the ones left until six in the afternoon. You walked like prisoners walk in the yard, giving turns in circles that don't lead anywhere, but at least give you the illusion of movement, of progress, of something happening even if nothing is happening.

You went down Antonio Leyva street. You passed in front of the Chinese hardware store that was always open, at ten in the morning and at ten at night, as if the Chinese didn't sleep, as if the Chinese in Madrid's neighborhoods were a race of semi-humans immune to sleep and fatigue, who had discovered the secret of infinite productivity, and that secret was simply never closing and smoking methamphetamine. You passed in front of the Dominican hair salon where bachata music was always playing at a volume that made the glass vibrate. You passed in front of the phone center that almost nobody used anymore because everyone had WhatsApp, but it was still there, resisting, like a dinosaur that refuses to become extinct, with its wooden booths and its rates to Morocco and Ecuador and Romania written on a blackboard with colored chalk. Nothing else, another laundry shop.

You passed in front of Manolo's bar. Manolo's bar was an institution. Not an institution in the noble sense of the word, not like the Prado Museum or the National Library, but an institution in the sense of Carabanchel: a place that had always been there and would always be there, immutable, eternal, with its same plastic chairs on the terrace and its same zinc bar and its same slot machine blinking in the corner like the eye of an epileptic cyclops, and its same smell of burnt coffee and frying oil and floor disinfectant. Manolo was at the door, smoking, with his apron stained with grease and the face of a man who had spent forty years serving beers to people who couldn't afford to drink anywhere else, and who had developed a philosophy of life based on resignation and throwing cigarette ashes on the floor.

"Hey, kid," he said as you passed by. Not because he wanted to talk to you. Because Manolo said "hey, kid" to anyone who passed in front of his bar under the age of thirty. It was his way of greeting. His way of acknowledging your existence without committing to a conversation. A social grunt. A verbal handshake that didn't require stopping or responding.

"Hey," you said. And you kept walking.

You arrived at the park. The same park as always. The Green Wedge that wasn't green. You sat down on the same bench as always. The bench with the broken middle board that someone had tried to fix with duct tape and that the rain had peeled off, leaving a hole where the cold air went straight to your ass. You sat down any...