August, October

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The author would like to express his gratitude for the grant received from the HALMA network during the editing phase of this novel, and to thank to the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Cervantes Institute, the Het Beschrijf literary society in Brussels, and the Translators’ House of the Hungarian Ministry of Culture.

It would start on the way from the beach to the house, walking back with his parents and his little sister. Arousal that was more like discomfort than pleasure. He’d take off his bathing suit and masturbate in the bathroom before showering, conjuring up vague images he’d seen on the beach a few minutes earlier or on the walkway that led from the beach to the house his parents had rented for the summer, images that were almost abstract, of girls his age or a little older, sixteen or seventeen. Rather than any one specific body, what he saw when he closed his eyes and began touching himself was an indistinct amalgam of imaginary bodies whose contours were, at the same time, somehow disturbingly concrete. The crease of a girl’s hips when she sat, for example, or the slope of breasts in profile, or those strange, circular, dimple-like indentations at the base of a back. He didn’t feel attracted to those things, it was more an enthralled sort of revulsion, as if the images somehow merited awe and yet were simultaneously preposterous. Sometimes he actually found it difficult to recall specific bodies he’d just seen, or he could recall them but not tell them apart. He’d have the whitewashed image of a girl in a bikini walking along the water’s edge as if her hip hurt with each step, or a girl’s back, a skinny back, like that of a sickly old man, or a pair of arms crossed over a chest and an almost amphibian whiteness, full of little, blue veins.

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