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He hasn’t yet turned fifteen when he sees his first dead person in the flesh He’s somewhat astonished that this man, a close family friend of his mother’s husband, is as disagreeable to him now, shrunken by the too-narrow walls of his coffin, as when he was alive He sees him in his suit, sees that face rejuvenated by the funeral preparations, made up, the skin yellowish and gleaming like wax, only flawless, and he feels the same rabid antipathy that comes over him every time their paths cross But then it’s always been like this, since the day he first met him, eight years earlier, one summer in Mar del Plata, a little before lunch   There’s no hint of a breeze, the cicadas are launching another deafening offensive Fleeing the heat, the heat and the boredom, he wanders idly around the big, ramshackle house built at the beginning of the twentieth century where he never manages to find his place, despite the smiles the owners greet him with almost before he’s set foot in it, the private room they assign to him on the first floor, and the insistence with which his mother assures him that, even though he’s new there, he has just as much right to the house and to everything that’s in it—including the garage full of bikes, surfboards, and polystyrene bodyboards, and also the garden with its linden trees, gazebo, swing seat, and flower beds full of hydrangeas that the sun scorches and discolours until the petals look as though they’re made of paper—as everyone else, and by everyone else she means the still vague but inexplicably expanding legion that he, with a bewilderment that years of hearing the expression have not dissipated, hears called his stepfamily, a whole tribe of step-cousins, step-aunts, and step-grandmothers that have sprung up from one day to the next like warts, often without giving him time for the basics, like remembering their names, for example, and associating them with the corresponding faces The agony he feels forced to suffer because he doesn’t belong: every step he takes is wrong,