Instead, I like to walk with the dirty old men along the Paseo Marítimo in Blanes in the summer. I like to watch the beach. There, from that triumphal throng of half-naked bodies, beautiful and ugly, fat and thin, perfect and imperfect, a magnificent smell wafts up to us, the smell of suntan lotion. I like the smell that rises from that mass of bodies in all shapes and sizes. It isn’t strong, but it’s bracing. Though it isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s even a sad smell. And possibly metaphysical. The thousand lotions, the sunscreens. They smell of democracy, of civilization.