– 76 –

We hold back the rain and release it

Look at us. We're both dressed in grown-up clothes, but look how afraid we are, at the point of going underwater: a deep blue forgotten war zone, and the possibility of corpses.

An hour along the road to Guadalajara, the storm brings us to a standstill. I look out at a man in a sodden white T-shirt, left in the back of a white pick-up, reeling his hands in to his face, pulling them away again.

The path becomes a passage between rock and rock. There we stand motionless; we can hear water dripping into rock pools and the movement of a small stream coursing over rock.

It's raining. The sudden downpour sends us dashing in beside a red metal staircase. Water is streaming through the red metal grating and dripping down over the dirty orange lights and down the long brown water marks

It's raining. The sudden downpour has filled the little streets with water, ankle deep.

I look, and it's not raining at all. It's dry and warm, and the little gold leaves are blowing down, blowing into heaps in the edges of the streets.