It was no longer a time of hunger. Earlier, bread had been spread with pork fat, butter or bacon melted in the warmth of the hearth. Then came olive oil sprinkled with sugar on toasted slices. ‘A blessed glory!’ according to Amadora.

‘A blessed glory, that’s right!’ she would murmur while stirring the contents of the pot.

Elsa never got to try such palatal delicacies. It repulsed her a little to sink her teeth into the crust and feel the soft part soaked with oily currents sliding down the corners of her mouth. Esperanza, her mother, on the other hand, remembered it as a treat from her childhood. Without a doubt, hunger belonged to other times… Now Elsa sweetened her mouth with chocolate, frequently changed her shoes, not only when they were too tight or the leather was worn, but to match a newly bought blouse, although austerity reigned in that household. To be sure, Elsa ignored the feeling of emptiness in her stomach, of cold in her body from a lack of clothes or heaviness in her eyes because of the absence of images with which to nourish a feeling of sleepiness. To say she had never suffered hunger and cold was to affirm an irrevocable reality. Which was why she shouldn’t feel guilty…

‘… because nobody is born with guilt in the cradle, only with sorrow, my daughter,’ Esperanza used to comfort her.

Meanwhile, sitting at the table in silence, Elsa listened to the conversations among the adults, who often spoke of a past in which hunger seemed to have a life of its own, and it struck her as anachronistic to mention this before the food served daily with handcrafted modesty and with generous culinary abandon on days of celebration.

During these conversations of a monotonous bent, hunger would be joined by the word ‘war’. Hunger and war were two words that coincided in the language of her grandparents. Xuliano Contreras pronounced the word ‘war’ with great emphasis because he had actively taken part on the Republican side, and hunger had been relegated to an unimportant second level for the defenders of the cause.