I hate summer... in the village

4) A notepad to write down all the names of the people who are introduced to you and tell you they are distant relatives, even if you haven't met them in person.

5) Learn the lyrics to La Ventanita and some pasodobles, although I fear, as I mentioned in an article a month ago, that pasodobles won't be heard when we grow up, but rather La Gasolina and other urban pieces.

6) A lot of patience.

My town is a beautiful little Andalusian village with whitewashed houses. It's called Quesada, Jándula in my latest novel, and I adore it. It's my own personal Macondo, a place steeped in superstition and magical customs, hidden, moreover, in the folds of a remote valley. However, in summer it suffers from the same evil as the rest of the province: the extreme heat of the peninsula's interior. That's why my father had the idea of joining the trend of installing ceiling fans in every room of the village house. He got so carried away that he installed four, and now I'm afraid he'll turn them all on at once and the house will end up flying like the one in Up . Or that I'll wake up sleepwalking, stand up in bed, and end up being the protagonist of Final Destination 10: Death in Jaén .

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My mother, up until now, didn't want fans, because in the village she was fine using a water flifli and dousing herself while trying to fall asleep. But last summer, she accidentally spilled a chemical product my father had put in the flifli to cure the olive trees, and she developed rosacea on her cheeks. She said it was because of the fluflu , because she sometimes calls it with a u; she looked like Espinete, and so she supported converting the house into Up's. Since then, both she and I test the water before using the flifli . We're like water diviners.

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I have good memories of the town in the summer, but also bad ones. I'll intersperse them: the olive grove at night is beautiful, as the olive trees cast a very dark shadow on the limestone earth that protects and soothes, and the land ends up resembling a mottled lunar landscape, as long as there's a full moon; the doctors have all gone on vacation, and you have to travel to Córdoba or Granada when something hurts and you think it's a tumor; the wind on the last nights of August smells of hardcover books, of going back to school, of childhood and life without death; the fields burn so happily, and more than one fire gives you a good scare; seeing your grandparents taking a nap is a beautiful sight, with their faces full of flies and their mouths open, emitting the silence and snoring that, as adults, we will associate with childhood; if you open Tinder, the app shows you only two people and, immediately after, tells you there's no one within 120 kilometers...

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But the most precious thing about spending summers in the villages is the magical effect of time stretching out and becoming eternal. The hours languish, melt, and emanate that good thing we have less and less of: boredom. If the mind isn't left fallow, it will never be fertile, and those dead hours in the villages are excellent for reading, writing, or simply lying back and doing nothing: looking at the whitewash on the walls, listening to the happy cicadas, ignoring Jordi Hurtado's human calculator...

And it was the siestas in Jaén that made me a reader. My cousin was reading The Lord of the Rings , and I, barely ten years old, marveled at the peace she emanated. How was it possible for her to remain calm and happy for so many hours? That book was the first I ever read, the gateway to an entire universe and a new conception of existence, to the architectural miracle of building a world in someone else's head, because that's what writing is: being a world builder.

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Without the people, I would not be a reader or a writer, and my life would have been much more miserable.

Besides the pleasure of reading, when night falls, after the eternal siesta, new leisure activities appear: you can take a dip in the river, go see the Virgin Mary at the church and smell the basil, drink a latte in the garden, or even play a rather peculiar game I invented as a child in the village with my cousins. It consisted of walking down a street next to a bank where several old people were chatting and trying to make sure none of them looked at you. Anthropologically, this is impossible if it's your first time walking past, as the locals immediately register you. You have to walk past many times until they get bored of you. Then, with luck, you might walk past a thirty-fifth time and they won't even look at you. I don't remember ever winning.

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Other games we played as children: ringing doorbells and running away, throwing rocks at cars in the middle of olive groves where couples were having sex and making love; sneaking into old houses, because back then, no one in the village locked their doors; building huts in the garden, or simply digging deep holes to see if we could find treasure or, with luck, water, the greatest treasure in my homeland… The sad thing is that none of these things are done by adults anymore. That's why now, at 35, life in the countryside in the summer seems more difficult for me.

I thank God, in my case, for having blessed me with the gift of boredom during those siestas and, as a result, for having taken a notebook and jotted down my grandparents' stories from the past. That's how I was so happy in the countryside and survived the 40-degree heatwaves of so many August months.