I hate summer... at the beach

There's a joke my best friend hates, probably because she's Buddhist and has spent her whole life preparing to die consciously and peacefully. "Leticia, can you imagine the last thing we remember on our deathbed is a summer song? A whole life searching for purity, only to end up with "Summer has arrived, it has arrived, it has arrived" in our heads! " She gets angry because she says I'm digging that idea into her subconscious and that I'm going to end up ruining her life. And she's right, even though she loves summer, if that means anything.

The beaches, Juan! The beaches!

As a true Andalusian from the interior, and from a humble olive-growing family, our holidays never involved foreigners or other communities, but rather Benalmádena, Matalascañas, Roquetas de Mar… The furthest we ever went was Murcia, to La Manga del Mar Menor, where my mother made a point of repeating to us morning and night, with a look of disgust, that the water was “peeling,” really “peeling.” We never went to hotels, but to apartments that sometimes turned out to be garages with screens and a hose surrounded by curtains, or to some Civil Guard barracks with iron beds and brown blankets that got itchy if it got cold and you had to scrunch them up. So I was able to enjoy the full experience and observe firsthand the atmosphere generated on the tourist beaches.

I was a very nervous child, with twitching eyes and hundreds of ideas swirling around in my head, but shy around strangers. When I wasn't reading, I buried myself in the ground so as not to roast in the heat, and watched, camouflaged, everyone else. A small lizard from Jaén. My mother didn't like that. She was afraid someone would step on my head, but then she'd add: "Although with that big head of yours..." And I'd stare at her, wide-eyed, with sand on my chin, thinking about what my own mother had said to me about that monstrous thing. She laughed, so naturally. So, after years of family summers on crowded beaches, through so much observation, I was able to attest to the existence of a new species. After the appearance of the homo football football, a specimen that sings Looo, lo, lo, lo, lo, loooo, lo when he is happy, that instead of caressing his friends, slaps them hard on the back and that exalts his country according to how fast the feet of eleven men are, a new hominid arrived: the homo beach beach.

Homo beach beach: This refers to a human being who, far from distancing himself from the adverse circumstances generated by beaches in summer, which are almost all of them, adapts to them, reproduces them, and yearns for them.

I'm thirty-five years old, and I still wonder how anyone can possibly enjoy coming home to sand even in Ohio, with their ankles covered in mud and their flip-flops making flop-flop sounds, and with skin that's a little more tanned than the day before, a sign that it's been injured and needs to regenerate; how anyone can feel at peace around people taking pictures of their feet against the ocean, or feel comfortable naked surrounded by people who smell of Bavaria, Fanta, and seaweed. And I'm not used to showing my naked body in front of strangers! I'm modest, so don't let the nudists kill me.

Not to mention the tacky, loud music in beach bars and on the radio. Has anyone ever considered how beautiful it would be to swim at sunset with Grieg playing in the background? First, the Despechá (I'll buy that one), but then the Adagio from the Piano Concerto in A minor. And having to pee on the beach... Me, if I don't stay really still, I can't, and if I don't move, I think everyone's guessing I'm peeing, and I stop and don't, and I arrive at the garage with the screens with a bladder full of Fanta, in a lot of pain. Not to mention the fear of being stung by a jellyfish and people in a group demanding I pee on my leg, because I don't know how to pee if they're looking at me either!

And the robberies, and the mojitos sold in poor condition, and the slobbering glances at topless women, and the scares you get from nonagenarians who suddenly appear covered in black mud for rheumatism, and the noise of children with their damned shovels and balls... And the catalogue of defined bodies and me with mine, rubble! And if the wind picks up and you can't go to sea, they punish us under the parasol to watch life go by. Then my father approaches, excited, and saves me: he asks me if I prefer Camy or Frigo, and I put my arm around his shoulders, because I love him very much, and we go to get a FrigoPié, the only thing that can lift my spirits a little.

Luckily, amidst all this excess, my father or the lady who delivers Nutella sometimes appears, singing a little song that I should have recorded sometime ago so I could live off the profits.

How I admire human beings! How well they adapt to adverse circumstances!