Darkness falls over Alfalfa

“It looks like a pegboard,” the child says about the sea of sunflowers in the newspaper, and the father looks up and looks down, examining the print’s screen of differently coloured dots.

With a more attentive gaze, the father begins to study the other articles fanned out across the table. Here it is claimed that Argentina has the most psychotherapists per capita in the world. There that ambidexterity is the ability to write with both hands at once. In the news briefs that computers have discovered that men and women have different retinas.

But of course this does not happen. Newspapers do not write about such things.

Yet let us imagine that they do, as darkness falls over Alfalfa, as the cup is drained of cappuccino, as three hundred and forty-seven breaths are taken unnoticed, as the waiter discreetly picks olives up from the floor, and the caffeine rises towards the brain like a suddenly returning personality.

And as it is time to leave.

Then she appears, in the middle of Plaza de la Alfalfa, the one who spoke about working at the checkout during the pandemic, in connection with the horror film Smile. It was connected in that behind the face mask she learned to smile in new ways. In the film without involving the eyes. In reality without the mouth. Quite troublesome, she said, but something that could be practised.

So let us believe that she appeared in the square with her picnic basket filled with artichokes and marmalade and began to talk about her Moroccan parents and her Catholic girls’ school and the ten years without citizenship and about the friend who works at the bar behind Las Setas: perhaps you would like to come along?

The child is given a Sprite. The father a draught cerveza. They pay for everything. This is not happening, yet it might have happened, we imagine. What is true, however, is that evening becomes night, and that towards five in the morning they head to the airport with a group of friends from Triana to sit in the arrivals hall. They watch people. People do not look back. They simply reunite and are absorbed in that.

But what really happens is that the father stares at the sea of sunflowers in the newspaper and mutters something inaudible, because in truth he has seen nothing. Or not even that. Not even that happened.