Skin. Sergio del Molino

to me. Do they itch?

      A bit.

      You mustn’t scratch them.

      I won’t scratch, Comrade Stalin.

      You’re doing it right now.

      I’m a dissident, that’s the thing.

      And an imbecile. Now, leave me be for a bit, I’m going to meditate in my room. I’ve got a statistics exam tomorrow. You, get yourself a doctor’s appointment.

      She shut herself in with her supermarket candles (never from La Milagrosa) and the bag of bog-standard sea salt with which she made a protective circle on the ground, and I didn’t see her again until the following day. I never bothered her when she entered that state, not so much out of respect as because those rituals struck me as a piece of overacting that jeopardised her metamorphosis into a cosmopolitan, liberal kind of witch. It pained me to see her plunge into an esotericism so down-at-heel.

I went on scratching those nanoscopic blotches – the colour of which varied from red to light pink according to the light, the time of day or how hydrated or dry my skin was – until they bled. Then I saw that they weren’t, as I initially thought, insect bites or spots, but patches of flaky skin. My nails had broken through the tiny plaques, not dissimilar to scabs, bringing a small amount of blood to the surface. Very thick little blobs of blood that dried instantly, forming a horrible black scab that I picked off as well, making it bleed once more. Scratching made it worse, but there’s not a person in the world who can resist.

      My head was also itching. I’d had light dandruff for a while, which, given my long hair, was very annoying but until that moment I’d never connected to the blotches on my arm. Structurally, the flaky skin was the same as dandruff. They were the same thing. Psoriasis. Dermatitis. An infection, I thought. I would like to say that I didn’t worry about it in the slightest, but that inverted devil had planted certain thoughts in my head. Like all true believers, I made a great effort to appear sceptical and joked with Patricia as she read my cards, to the point that my not taking it seriously made her angry. But obviously I did take it seriously. That was why I laughed.

      I eased open the drawer containing the tarot set. It was the first time I’d taken it out when she was at home. Please, I said, don’t let her need the toilet or a drink of water, but Patricia must have entered genuine trances because I never once saw her come out of her room when she was meditating. I looked for the devil card, which when I found it was once again upside down. I turned it over and regarded it for a few moments. It was beautiful.

Tarot cards remind me of illuminated manuscripts. They contain all the world’s ingenuousness and worldliness at the same time, that so very naïve yet consoling idea that things of complexity, even unknowable things, can be expressed in a cryptic symbol. The major arcana have cabbalistic meanings. The devil corresponds with the letter samekh, which according to Patricia, refers to the shell that surrounds us. It is invoked in order to liberate us from the unpredictability of the future, and to enable our personality to develop beyond the limits of our outer casing. The devil and samekh alike want us to peel away our skin, to burst at the seams in order to move unguardedly closer to the Unnameable. Samekh is a potato peeler that removes our skin in order to reveal the ego, but all I saw was a very angry Stalin looking out at me, a death-sentence-signing face, and I had no idea how that could help me find God, whom I’d never had any great desire to meet anyway.

      It wasn’t the Soviet Terror, or the Cabala, or the major arcana that were making my stomach crawl. The suggestion had come a number of days before, when Patricia had read my palm. We’d had a few drinks together in the living room and it had grown late. We were tired, but neither of us felt like going to sleep and we drew the evening out providing one another with increasingly unspeaking, absurd company. My hand ended up in hers by accident, and then she couldn’t avoid reading my palm. I observed her very closely. She ran her fingertip over the lines on my palm, barely skimming the surface, and asked if I wanted to know.

      I always want to know, Patri.

      I won’t say anything about the other lines, which are normal, but the life one is strange, I’ve never seen one like it.

      Why?

      The normal thing is for it to be long and not very pronounced, but yours is very short, do you see? And very deep. It looks like a wound, something artificial. It’s deeper towards the end, but, unlike the rest of the lines, it doesn’t grow thinner. Look, it ends here, abruptly.

      And what does that mean?

Well, you already know that the lines change in accordance with changes in our life. This is not your fate. It’s a portrait of your present moment, of the future that will befall you if you fail to wake up to your situation.

      Fine, fine, but tell me what it means.

      But I just told you: that you will have a short life, that it’s going to end abruptly. In an accident, maybe, or in a terminal illness.

      I won’t suffer, then.

      I don’t see that. Possibly. But what this shows is a short life that ends suddenly.

      Well, you ought to make the most of me while I’m still around.

      Look, matey, it’s pretty late to be starting with the whole sexual tension thing. Late in the evening, and in our relationship. Plus, I’ve got my period.

      Witches don’t have periods.

      I don’t know about the others, but this witch is going to take a Nolotil and get some sleep.

      Before I fell asleep on the sofa, in front of the late-night shopping channel adverts, I convinced myself that I wasn’t going to make it to thirty, which to me seemed not such a bad thing, maybe because from the vantage point of having just turned twenty-one, thirty seemed a long way away, or because the days were dragging by and racking up thousands of longueurs to the point of being consumed by aches and pains and bones twisted out of shape by arthritis seemed an unbearable prospect to me. A quick death, and with any luck a clean one. A quick passing, too quick for very much suffering, with no children around to traumatise or lovers to mourn me. Not only was it more consoling as an idea than anything the tarot could offer, it also confirmed my oldest belief.

I already knew I was going to die young. I had known since I was eight. My parents and I had lived in a holiday-destination village near Valencia – we had moved quite a bit, though not what you could call nomadically – with a beach that would fill up with people from Madrid, and French and Germans, in the summer. Before you heard them speak, you could tell a foreigner by the flabby whiteness of their northern skin, dazzling at a distance. We village children would have had carboniferous tans from the very first sunny days in the spring. By the time the tourists came around, we were all well toasted and had no need of sun cream or parasols. Which was why we ran around on the beach from sunrise to sunset without our parents batting an eyelid.

      Nowadays I envy my parents, I who cannot take my eye off my son for a second when we’re on the beach and won’t let him out of my sight or run off if I don’t know who he’s with. Compared with me, he’s grown up in a bubble, or something zoo-like, but, in exchange for my paranoid vigilance, I offer him a world without fears. Not only does he believe that witches don’t egg-siss, he also has no conception of the everyday evil of the paedophile, the kidnapper or the man who laces sweeties with sedatives. He doesn’t need to know about any of that, because his mother and I are always there to ward off such things. My parents didn’t watch me every second of the day. Their approach was to load me up with a repertoire of horror stories far more effective than the police force. On the prompting of these tales, my friends and I were wary of any adult who happened to come prowling around. If a car slowed to a halt next to where we were playing in one of the irrigation ditches, we’d all just run away before anybody could even get out. If the door-to-door carpet salesman tried to cosy up to us, we’d throw sand at him and be gone in a flash. These were the easily preventable dangers, the ones we could get out of at a sprint, but there were others that were far more intangible and unpredictable. The worst of all being needles.

The