Sand castles

I felt like building castles in the sand, she told him, and he laughed. They were now beyond the storm of the previous year. She could no longer hear voices, and he could now kiss her on the mouth. It seemed like a miracle would be needed for these two things to happen after what they had been through. And perhaps those days on the beach were indeed an event of that nature, an elementary disorder beyond everything that in life is destined to go wrong, a disorderly turn, because the natural order of things is the one that leads us to suffering, and, after all, they were happy against the natural order of things. They were actually on holiday for the first time in twenty years. They had spent two decades wanting to be normal people, but always ending up not doing what normal people did. Now they understood the wisdom of others, the need to stop, to rest, and other small and funny things, like taking chairs to the beach to sit on the sand, things that now, lying in the shade, made them laugh at the kids they had been, in the days of laziness and sunburn, of drinking and big projects. On the beach, he read Oscar Wilde, she watched the kids playing ball, drawing characters, the athletic exhibitionists making fun of their obese friends, the little ones who cried if they didn't pass the ball to them, the even younger ones challenging their parents' patience. It seemed like you could draw a tiny outline of the world in the outline of the games on the seashore, she thought, until she took off her glasses and stared at the horizon, first staring at the dazzling light of the illuminated peak of the waves and then, with her eyes closed, the sun on her face, listening to the crickets, to the voices around her, muffled by the surf. It was all in that desire, of wanting to build sandcastles when he wasn't old enough to do so. He wanted to do that. To sit on the sand, in front of the parasol and entertain himself by fetching water from the seashore with a bucket, moistening the sand and molding it, digging a hole so that, at a certain point, the water would appear at the bottom. Perhaps it had to be this way, perhaps wishes had to be expressed retrospectively, when the time for their fulfillment had long since passed. I didn't want to be a child, I wanted to be a woman on the beach, building a sandcastle, perhaps that was just what life was all about, all the time, far away from the village where they now took walks at dusk, a village that I had known as a child and was now a transformed place, inhabited by people who had come from far away to work in the fields. How strange it would be, perhaps, to fulfill this desire that seemed plausible when she was on the beach and became sinister as soon as she wrote about it. How bizarre if, suddenly, between books and cigarettes, the grown woman brought out a bucket and a shovel and made castles like children do. And yet she had spent all her ages wanting to be the age she was today, she thought, as she saw a group of teenagers walking down the street smoking, just like she had once done. At night, the iodine entered the house, intoxicating, and they remained silent to the sound of the waves crashing against the cliff. From the surrounding bars, they listened to the immigrants' nightlife, rhythmic Nepalese and Indian music that girls with long black hair sang in chorus until late at night.

Lying in bed, she tried to fall asleep, her legs hurt, a cat meowed at the door of the house, waiting for something.