The yellow beach umbrellas, all identical, standing shoulder to shoulder, under which crowded in a certain disorder folding chairs, toys for the sand and the water, and cheerful conversations, colonized Hornillo Beach every summer, right in front of the entrance gate to the Las Cuatro Plumas chalet, built atop the very same sand. All the Augusts of my life, first with my parents, then with my friends and my own family, I have come daily to this beach in Águilas (Murcia), the town of my roots, my town.
Although the swims with my parents were brief – never longer than an hour – and light on luggage, as we barely carried a shared towel and the newspaper El País to skim between capuzón and capuzón, I had time to observe those who occupied that privileged colony of identical umbrellas. Few in town knew it, but I knew that beneath that expansive artificial shade, necessary in the muggy heat of Águilas, they enjoyed relevant names in the world of Spanish journalism.
My father, also a journalist, had been there, at Las Cuatro Plumas, on several occasions. Perhaps for that reason, that spot in front of which I swam every summer always awakened a great curiosity in me. But, who were those people whose presence on the beach, beneath that orderly tangle of twin umbrellas, did not go unnoticed? They were precisely the residents of the white chalet Las Cuatro Plumas. Five renowned journalists—and not four, as is often announced from the façade by their iconic wrought-iron and rust sign– who lived in Madrid and who, for various reasons, ended up forming a close friendship and spending summers together at this iconic residence in one of the bays most beautiful in the area.
