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Fernando Sdrigotti Sunstroke It’s the second time this morning that the lifeguard and a group of tanned men and women walk past, clapping, parading a lost kid. This kid is also crying: his eyes are red and swollen – he must have been lost for a while, before someone spotted him and took him to the lifeguard hut. Suddenly, a pudgy woman in a black one-piece swimsuit rushes towards the group. The kid’s face broadcasts happiness first, and then, after the man carrying him on his shoulders unloads him on the sand, panic. The woman – very likely his mother – grabs the kid by the right ear and pulls him away to the safety of their parasol, her shouts audible, her words carried away by the wind. And a few minutes later they pack up and leave the beach, the mother walking two or three metres ahead, the kid dragging the closed parasol on the sand, sucking tears and snot. Martín and his grandmother watch the whole affair unfold from their spot a couple of sandcastles away. It’s like watching two very similar episodes of the same soap opera. And a very similar drama will eventually play out once more. And over and over. Martín’s grandmother left the sunscreen in the hotel and she insists they stay in the shade for a couple of hours after lunch. Martín sulks and plays with the sand: digging holes and letting the sand fall through his fingers. But when his grandmother falls asleep with a magazine covering her face, Martín scampers to the shore. There are other kids there, on their own, not paying attention to one another. So Martín sits on the sand with his feet in the water and watches the waves come and go. They come and go, they come and go, pushing sand towards his crotch, and with this primeval rhythm Martín loses all sense of time. When his grandmother comes to pull him from his ear back in the shade it could be ten minutes or ten hours later. On the way back from the beach Martín can feel the skin on his shoulders tighten under the weight of his t-shirt. After walking for a while in the 11

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