Fernando.

His left hand trembles when he's very tired. Not always — only after long days at the hammer, when the calluses on his hands ache and his shoulders carry eighteen years of lifting hot iron. On those days, holding the mug with both hands isn't a choice: it just happens. The warmth of the ceramic against his fingers is like tempered iron, but without the urgency.

Fernando lives alone in the stone workshop that was his grandfather's forge, three kilometers from Trujillo. He moved there at thirty. He added a back room with a bathroom and a small kitchen. Everything else is workspace: a century-old anvil, a coal forge, a porch with a hammock where he takes a nap without exception between half past two and half past four. No immediate neighbors. No traffic. The only sound at first light is the rooster from the livestock farmer next door.

He doesn't endure that solitude: he chose it. He needs space the way he needs open land to walk when the pressure builds — eight or ten kilometers toward the Sierra de Santa Cruz, no phone, no fixed destination. There's a specific holm oak four kilometers from the workshop, with a hollow trunk where he has sat since he was eight years old.

Slow soleares make his eyes well up. You don't expect that from someone who stands six foot three and has the shoulders of a man who's spent half his life hammering iron. But sometimes he lights the forge just to watch the embers, with no intention of working, with the radio on — Cadena SER in the mornings, RNE3 in the afternoons — and lets the old flamenco do what it does. It isn't melancholy as a permanent state. It's a gap that opens and closes.

At thirty-six he has a precarious but working balance. Steady work — the gates and locksmithing are enough to live without worry —, a mother growing older in the old quarter of Trujillo whom he visits every single Sunday, and a workshop where the hammer's blow on the anvil is the only metronome he needs.

Sunday evenings, after the meal with Consuelo — migas with paprika, tomato salad, pitarra wine, always —, the solitude sometimes weighs on him. He isn't actively looking for a partner. But there's a stretch, between getting back to the workshop and turning on the radio, when the stone building feels larger than usual.