El viaje de mi padre

As so often happens, I paid little heed to those stories when my father told them, and now I regret it. My father died young, and his memories were consigned to that limbo where the lives of our forebears—those we failed to listen to while they were alive—gradually fade away. Later, we come to regret this and, just as I am doing now, try to piece together their small stories from the fragments that lingered in the air and that we can still recall. To honor his father and his father’s companions—and also to traverse the territory running along the backbone of the Iberian Peninsula, a landscape that encapsulates the region's essence like few others—the author retraced the journey. He undertook it during the very same months of the year as the original party, hoping to experience what they had felt, if only regarding the weather. Along the way, he encountered people who keep alive the memory of that terrible winter—the worst of the twentieth century—and of the scorching spring and summer by the sea; he also came across some of the stories his father had told him—stories that still seem to hover over the landscapes like a patina, "for history remains in the places where it unfolded, just as words remain in the memory."