Love in Lowercase by Francesc Miralles

egg.”
    â€œBravo. What skins was he talking about?”
    I could glimpse a flash of pride and sensitivity behind the girl’s glasses.
    â€œThe skins of the soul.”

The Album of Life
    I didn’t have any more classes till midafternoon, so I weighed my options: continue the work of Francis Amalfi, prepare my classes, or visit Titus.
    I decided to go for an entirely different option, a new one. I’d go and visit my sister. She was usually at home in the mornings. She’d left her job recently, after being afflicted by a mysterious illness that no one had yet been able to identify.
    Having decided to stick with the course of action I had adopted on the day of our Epiphany lunch, I started to repeat my mantra—
the opposite is best—
and hailed a taxi.
    As I gave the driver the address, I noticed his broad back and gray hair pulled into a ponytail. I also saw that his eyes were staring at me from the rearview mirror. There was no doubt about it. This was the man who’d told me about the mislaid sack of letters.
    â€”
    The doorman told me that Rita had gone out but that she’d be back soon.
    I decided to wait for her inside the apartment. As soon as I opened the door with the key she’d given me in case of emergency, I was greeted by the same old smell of patchouli permeating the whole place. When I had lived there with my father and sister I’dnever noticed it, but now I could easily recognize the smell of an unhappy childhood.
    My first thought was to turn on the television, which is what Andreu does the moment he walks through the door. However, the bovine image of my brother-in-law made me change my mind, so I wandered around the apartment, an intruder making the most of being alone.
    The living room and bedroom were constantly being redecorated, so there was nothing of interest there. Neither was there anything remarkable about the kitchen, where I found only some organic fruit juice and one bottle of vile-tasting beer from Malta.
    My inspection of the apartment took me to the storage room, a long, narrow space full of bits of furniture shrouded with ghostly-looking sheets. I tried to turn on the light, but the bulb had blown, which suggested that no one had been in there for a while.
    When my eyes got used to the feeble light filtering in from outside, I gingerly made my way to the back of the room. There I found a chest of drawers full of mementos from my childhood: school certificates, old comics, toys, and useless knickknacks. I groped around and found a big iron lamp which, surprisingly, lit up when I switched it on.
    This discovery shed light—literally and metaphorically speaking—on other things that brought back memories and past suffering: handwriting exercise books, a compass, a game of Chutes and Ladders, the bracelets my sister used to make out of strands of plastic . . .
    In the bottom drawer I found some music magazines and an old photo album I didn’t recall having seen before. I opened it and shone the light onto the first page, where a large portrait of my father almost made me put the album right back where I’d found it.
    After hesitating for a few moments, I opened it again with the morbid curiosity of an archaeologist digging into his own past.It began with a series of portraits of my father in different situations: at his university graduation ceremony, on a trip to London, or with my newborn sister in his arms.
    The images stirred up bitter feelings in me. Sitting on the storage-room floor like I used to as a small boy, I remembered how I had neglected my father when he was dying. I was about twenty then and still felt the scars of a childhood full of impenetrable silences.
    After my mother died, he disengaged completely from our lives, apart from the financial support he gave us. He thought he was doing his duty. My sister reacted by indulging in outrageous, extravagant behavior, while I plunged into a silence that answered