It has been more than fifty years for lightning to strike the San Francisco steeple. As a child I lived with him for a long time, at my grandmother’s house. On nights of fat drop, when I heard the thunder roar, I was scared and I would ask Doña María: -Why if a lightning strike would never stumble in our house? He answered me: -Because the City Council has lightning rods and the San Francisco Tower is taller and has bells. Rays are in love with metal objects. As kids we were afraid of lightning. The houses that were inhabited, established the magnitude of a minimum point in the universe. We went out to play in the street, to make our space bigger. When in summer I would go from the town to the farmhouse on horseback, I would cross the Almaraz mountain and I was chased by the fear of lightning and the shadows of the loose bulls of bordering capeas that could hide among the holm oaks. But I saw the most impressive storm in my adolescence, I suffered it crossing the Despeñaperros mountain range in those Seat 600s that would get hot if you accelerated. I understood the storm among those rocks, painted by the watercolorist Turner, of whom the notary Polvorosa has a marina in his office. The Despeñaperros was a sounding board for thunder and a magnificent setting for the reflection of lightning. Step designed by nature to keep the fury of the unleashed elements caged and entertained inside. The stones were dyed a thousand colors, reflected violets, yellows, oranges, the glow was the only compass in the storm and in the end everything faded into the greens of the vegetation, the tones were subsumed in a last shade of darkness, the own unenlightened reality. It was like the dream of our life. Soon colored, early plagued with events and at the end of the only reflection, the most terrible thing: terminal loneliness. The electric spark fell, the church of La Soledad illuminated by hachones cleared up in Holy Week and the brutal sound of thunder destroyed the church, the computers of the College of Architects, those of the City Council and even the telephone line. The storm swept away everything, like Barabbas, the bad thief.
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