Blanca and Nacho

Blanca and Nacho are childhood acquaintances whose friendship and occasional intimacy take shape in Cadaqués rather than in their shared city of Barcelona. Their relationship is marked by summer freedom and physical closeness, but also by distance: they never exchange phone numbers or make plans to see each other in Barcelona. When they meet again, Nacho’s cocaine addiction has transformed the charismatic figure Blanca remembers into a physically depleted man.

A Friendship That Begins After Childhood

Blanca and Nacho have known each other since they were children, but they do not become friends until she is past twenty. Nacho is nine years older, a difference that once shaped how he saw her: she says she stopped being a little tadpole to him, though he continued to use that nickname, while he stopped seeming like an old man to her. Their friendship thus begins when the age gap no longer defines their connection in the same way.

Intimacy and the Summer World

Blanca remembers Nacho as strikingly handsome, charismatic, and dissolute, with a combination of brightness and darkness that drew people toward him. She was among the women who did not resist his appeal. On more than one night, the two watched the sun rise together, curled up on a beach or sheltering in a doorway. Their intimacy is recalled as part of an expansive summer life rather than as the beginning of a settled partnership.

For Blanca, Nacho belongs to Cadaqués. He is bound in memory to boat trips, hammock siestas, and bread bought before dawn directly from the bakery, then eaten before they went home to sleep. Although both live in Barcelona, neither makes an effort to meet there, and they never exchange telephone numbers. The contrast defines the relationship: closeness belongs to the seasonal refuge, while ordinary life elsewhere remains unshared.

Reunion and Transformation

When Blanca sees Nacho again among a crowd in the village, he calls to her and kisses her on the lips, repeating the gesture with which he greeted her when they first met. The familiar kiss briefly bridges the years between them. Yet the man she encounters is also visibly changed. Once the self-styled king of the world, an athletic addict, and an inveterate womanizer, he now appears to Blanca as a beggar covered in ashes.

Blanca attributes this change to cocaine, which became Nacho’s only girlfriend. In her recollection, it has tightened his once-beguiling smile into a strained grimace and replaced his trusting, puppy-like gaze with eyes that seem cunning, hungry, and clouded. His once-flexible, distinguished body is now little more than a skeleton; as they climb the village’s cobbled slopes, he moves stiffly, as though each painful step strikes through a hollow body. Their reunion makes the passage of time legible in the body: the remembered summer companion is still present, but the cost of his life has become impossible to overlook.