On the afternoon at the end of December in which Eulogio Serrano decided to return the magic that had been lent him, he took his children to the field so that they could see the scratched tablets of the preserve and the measles of little glass bottles that had come out of the ancient olive grove of his father. For years he had had a mortgage of stories nailed in his conscience that forced him to cut his way through dandelions and nettles and tell his children that all loans, especially the care loan, always had to be repaid in full.
The olive trees, abandoned and defeated by the insistence of nature, had embedded the old penicillin bottles that his father had punctured in the holes in the trunks and where he kept stories and dense little phrases. As soon as Eulogio brushed the tips of his fingers against the embedded asses of the jars, the memories rose up his arms like coffee rises through the sugar cubes, and he soon realized that those words were still attached to the potreras of cotton that made her father’s stories come out sweet and believable. And he remembered how the carols that came to the olive grove dragged by the air from the tower hurt in his guts as a child, and in that world of narrowness, where the only thing that could be widened was his head, his father softened his cold mornings with tales of borage and lavender so that the work in the fields at Christmas would not etch a bitter copper taste on his palate as if he had spent his childhood sucking on church bells.
At that time there were few men who knew how to take weight off sentences and tell light stories that would sift through the roughness of the countryside, there were few because the words Christmas Eve and New Years were raw, and although they were beginning to cook in the hot breasts of some entire families, such as His had been cut in half for years, they still didn’t smell of nougat or rice pudding and cinnamon, but of early rises with icicle and Moorish olives.
That is why, in the middle of the olive grove, he told his children that that day in April, when it was completely dark in the mine and the water that flooded the galleries reached him above his ankles, he clearly remembered when his Father used to tell him that there were dragonflies, fat as dairy cows, with wings of tanned leather and their backs full of flint stones. And that they were so strange creatures that they still didn’t even have a name, but that, by dint of eating gutter bundles, green nettles and borriqueros thistles, they had burning that made their stomach flare out of their mouths. And on that December afternoon he repeated it to his children with long silences until they told him excitedly, that those had to be dragons, papa, surely they were dragons.