at a breath of wind

My son, who is going to be nine months old, loves two things: the crispy bread and the crane from the construction site in front of the house.

When it is barely dawn, he opens his eye and the first thing he looks at is the window of our room, to check that the crane is still there.

If he moves, and almost always at that time he moves, my son gets excited and starts waving his arms and babbling.

We were in those last Tuesday when I realized that the glass had been put a sepia filter.

It was the haze that my father had warned me about the day before, but he didn't imagine it that way, although the truth is that lately reality is becoming hyperbolic.

As Google responded to me in its featured news section when I searched for “calima”, it came from the Sahara desert.

What hardly appeared if one linked searches and

“Sahara” was that a few days earlier, in that same desert, different Saharawi media had denounced a drone bombing of civilian buildings.

The Spanish press had not covered it, nor had it barely covered the fact that last November, a Saharawi child died in the Agüenit region, in Western Sahara, the same region in which this attack was now being denounced.

The 15-year-old boy would have been the victim of a Moroccan drone, according to information from

.

The sand on which he died was the same that covered the windows of our cars this week.

For a few days in December 2016, those tiny pimples crept into my ears and nose, into my socks and blankets.

With the first double pay of my life, I went to the Saharawi refugee camps in Tindouf to meet again, 20 years later, with Fatma and Lehbib, the children we fostered at home during the summers of my childhood.

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Like me, they were already in their late thirties, so instead of playing ball we talked about a few things.

Of God, of the family, of how it had been for them to be born and grow up in a land that was not theirs or that they only knew their country through the stories of their parents and grandparents, who were forced to flee from there with the Green March.

Of growing up dreaming, as Marcos Ana wrote, of “a horizon without a lock and without a key”.

And that for Spain they only had, to my surprise, an eternal gratitude.

Despite the abandonment of our institutions.

Although its flag does not appear on the jacket lapel of our politicians or our television presenters.

Although his cause, which is ours, is betrayed by our governments: this very Friday, Sánchez abandoned the Saharawis in the hands of the country that bombards them.

The older ones around there still keep their Spanish passports and display them proudly.

Like that of Fatma and Lehbib, several generations of Saharawis have not set foot in their country, they have not lived any reality other than that of the refugee camps.

But young and old still speak our language, sing our songs, get excited about the goals of our teams.

We, however, have forgotten that less than 50 years ago they were Spanish.

That from them, as the haze has reminded us this week, only a breath of wind separates us.

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