Orbayo en el Caribe

This week, the writer Raquel Presumido told me that she never imagined the end of the world would be a day at the beach. I felt a frigid chill and thought of the horror film "Midsommar," where all the terrifying events occur during a daytime celebration, while the characters wear festive flower crowns. The megaphone of San Lorenzo, that striped beach with striped umbrellas, had just announced to swimmers that the water temperature in the Bay of Biscay was 22 degrees.

I was lucky or unlucky enough to experience it on my own skin the same day that the press reported that the record of 24 degrees Celsius had been broken in the Vigo estuary, more than six meters deep. Such delicious temperatures but absolutely disconcerting. We are not only post-COVID, but also permanently obsessed with thermometers.

At night, I dined on a fresh tomato roll with fried potatoes in a dining room draped with dark wooden panels where the air conditioning had never been turned on. The stones of the walls of Casa Tino, where an old telephone booth houses red and yellow coolers from the days when glass bottles were refilled before turning into colored stones, still have the same owners but the waiters have a Latin accent.

The Indians would not believe it if they could see that the land of Orbayo is now tropical. And that their houses have become museums that honor them as intrepid entrepreneurs. There is something of magical realism in the world of climate change. My friend Raquel Presumido writes, in fact, magical realism Asturleonese. In her previous book of short stories, "Rats in the Pantry," she imagines the civilization that lives at the bottom of the pond in her town.

One day, when she is going to swim in the reservoir, something brushes her feet from the depths: it could be grass or a fish, but her upbringing's scared mind chooses to think it is the sharp nail of a witch. In the latter, one of her protagonists is obsessed with a cold fog that only slides down the mountains of her land, the lutano.

In San Lorenzo, I heard a five-year-old boy tremble in fear when his mother tried to make him go into the water. "Sea snakes!" screamed the poor kid, hysterical. There was none visible, but I understood him perfectly. Fear is free in times of ecoanxiety.