Older Brother. Daniel Mella

shatter when the bullets hit them. The rumour spreads that one of the guests at the party is a thief and is planning to steal something, but no one knows who it is or what he wants to steal, and we’re all on guard. The Indian actor is leading the investigation and at a certain point he captures a young couple, who fight back. He wraps them in a kind of blue nylon bag that grows on its own and closes over the length of their bodies, like a cocoon.

      The night of 8th February, a few hours before Alejandro returns to the nothing from whence he came, we’ll have a long and wide-ranging conversation about survival – my dad, Marcos, Maca, Mariela, and Mauro. After ploughing through an order of mozzarella and farinata, we’ll take our coffee out to the porch while Mum makes up the beds in what used to be my room. It might seem like a coincidence that we’d choose this very subject on the night Ale was going to die on us, but the truth is we always talked about survival when we got together, if my father was there: survival, the annihilation of the human race and the stupidity of the human species.

      At first, it had always been Dad who insisted on starting those conversations. We ascribed it in part to the start of the new millennium, but especially to the fact that Dad was becoming a generic old man, seeing destruction and conspiracy everywhere he looked. Little by little, though, it seemed the world had decided to prove him right. After a while there was no need for anyone to even mention some disaster pulled from the pages of the news; we’d just launch straight into a rant against the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds and all the rest of the world’s pricks. Bankers, masons, politicians, Zionists – no one was safe.