Fernando.

Adrián is sixteen years old, lives in Trujillo, and has started showing up at the workshop on Saturday mornings. Fernando hasn't told him he can come or that he can't. He lets him in, lets him watch. Sometimes he hands him the bellows. He doesn't explain what he's doing while he does it, because that's how he was taught: by watching, not by listening.

Adrián has dropped out of school. In that he resembles Fernando at fifteen. Fernando knows this, because Trujillo has nine thousand people and things get known without anyone telling you. He hasn't asked him why he dropped out. He hasn't suggested he go back. He hasn't told him that life without qualifications is harder — that would be hypocritical coming from someone who did exactly the same thing.

What Fernando doesn't know is whether he's seeing a reflection of himself or projecting something he doesn't dare name. His grandfather Eustaquio taught him without asking anything in return: he put the tools in front of him and let the iron speak. Fernando does the same with Adrián, without having consciously decided to. He lets him watch. He lets him touch a cold piece. If the kid asks a question, he answers in three words and keeps working.

The way Fernando relates to passing on a trade says something about him that his words don't. Fernando talks little — deep voice, Extremaduran Spanish, short sentences. "I'll let you know" is what he says when he needs time. He makes decisions slowly. But with Adrián there's no decision to make: he simply doesn't send him away.

Fernando left school because the forge pulled harder than high school. His mother Consuelo objected with all the force a mother can muster. She gave him one condition: that he at least get his certificate. He got it self-taught, studying in the evenings after spending the mornings in the building. At eighteen he already had an open workshop. At twenty, his first real commission: two four-meter gates for an estate renovated by a Madrid architect who found him because a cattle farmer said "if you want something in iron that isn't from a catalog, talk to the boy at the forge."

He hasn't needed any other calling card than that phrase in sixteen years.