The sun is blazing over the city.

It's summer. People stroll leisurely along the main street, pausing at the shop windows and seeking the relief of the shade cast by the awnings. Sometimes, luck is on their side, and a cool breeze washes over the passerby when the shop door opens, releasing that mix of music and voices that beckon them inside.

Carlos had returned to the city. His city. The one where he was born back in the 1950s. The one where he had experienced his first loves. The one where he had felt alive, yes, ALIVE in capital letters... because what he had done afterward wasn't living, but merely vegetating.

So many memories! So many unfulfilled dreams! So many furtive glances lost without finding those calm, sometimes raging, seas that were her eyes! How many times he had dreamed of returning and that everything he had experienced had been just a nightmare...!

Carlos gazed at the bookstore window. He decided to go in and lose himself browsing the books on the shelves. A Beatles song was playing loudly, filling the room with "Please Mr. Postman".

Memories flooded back, and the question that had been nagging at him for the past thirty years hammered at his brain: Why hadn't Maria waited for him? Why had Maria never answered his letters?

Carlos and Maria were madly in love. They had loved each other since childhood, silently, discreetly. No one knew, only them. He still remembers his mother's face when he told her that, upon returning from his military service, he would marry her.

"That can't be, son!" his mother said.

"Why do you say that, Mother? Maria is the woman of my life, and I will marry her, whether you like it or not, when I get back."

He didn't say anything to Maria about the conversation he'd had with his mother. When it was time for him to join the army, he left her in tears. Heartbroken and pleading, she said to me, "Carlos, I'll wait for you. Write to me! Don't forget to write to me..."

And we melted into a kiss whose taste flooded my body and remained in my mind forever.

And I wrote. And I wrote again. I received no reply. I grew impatient. I wrote again... this time to my mother, asking her to give me news of María.

My mother's letter arrived by return mail. It said: "María has married. Forget about her."

It was my living death. Nothing else made sense.

When my military service ended, I didn't go home. I went to sea and have been running from my memories ever since. I'm old, I feel old, and I wanted to return to the city, my city, to confront the past.

The song kept playing...

My mother worked at the post office at that time. Sometimes she took me with her, and I liked to smell the letters, love letters, perfumed letters. I fantasized about the women who wrote them.

But mine never arrived. Thousands of times I waited for the postman to bring me the letter from my beloved Maria... but it never happened.

The song kept playing...

I took a book from the shelf and went to the counter to buy it.

The cashier was serving another customer. When she finished, she turned to me and said:

"Will you take the book?"

That voice...! Those eyes...! My heart began to pound.

"Maria?" I said in a whisper that barely left my throat.

"Yes, I'm Maria. Do I know you?" she said. 

"Maria," I said again, unable to utter a single word.

Maria looked at me and fainted.

When she came to, she hugged me and, sobbing, said: 

"Your mother told me you had died."