THE STORY OF RAFA AND DANI 15 DAYS IN THE SUN

You walked 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 covered with your legs could shorten the ones remaining until six in the evening. You walked like prisoners walk in the yard, making circles that don't lead anywhere but give you the illusion of movement, of progress, of something happening even if nothing is happening.

You went down Antonio Leyva Street. You passed by the Chinese hardware store that was always open, at ten in the morning and ten at night, as if the Chinese man never slept, as if the Chinese people in Madrid's neighborhoods were a breed of semi-humans immune to sleep and fatigue who had discovered the secret of infinite productivity, and that secret was simply never closing. You passed by the Dominican hair salon where bachata music always played at a volume that made the glass vibrate. You passed by the phone booth that almost nobody used anymore because everyone had WhatsApp, but it was still there, resisting, like a dinosaur that refused to become extinct, with its wooden cabins and its rates to Morocco and Ecuador and Romania written on a blackboard with colored chalk.

You passed by 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 been serving beer to people who couldn't afford to drink anywhere else for forty years, and who had developed a philosophy of life based on resignation and flicking ash 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 by 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 plank that someone had tried to fix with duct tape and that the rain had unstuck, leaving a hole where the cold air seeped directly into your butt. You sat down anyway. The cold in your butt was the least of your worries. The cold in your butt was an insignificant detail in the inventory of discomforts that made up your daily life.

The par...