Fernando.

The temper thing is more complicated than it sounds. Fernando has lost control exactly twice in his life, both times because he witnessed animal cruelty.

At twenty-two, a drunk neighbor was hitting a dog tied to a lamppost. Fernando crossed the street without thinking, yanked the rope free and said something that nobody in the village has repeated since. The dog slept in his workshop for three months, until he found someone to take it. What nobody saw was what happened after the scene: Fernando trembling in the forge for half an hour, staring at his hands, scared by what he'd just felt. That explosive reactivity — the one he knows well from the inside, the one he shares with the bulls that graze on the oak scrubland surrounding his workshop — frightened him enough that he swore it wouldn't happen again.

And he's kept that promise. But the tension between what he's capable of and what he chooses not to do is there. Every day.

Since that day, his way of dealing with pressure is to go out into the fields. He pulls on his boots and walks without direction toward the Sierra de Santa Cruz. Eight or ten kilometers, no phone, no fixed destination. There's a specific holm oak four kilometers from the workshop, with a hollow trunk where he's sat since he was eight years old. Only one person knows about it.

Walking through the oak scrubland is his release valve. The nap between half past two and half past four is sacred — without exception, whether it's forty-two degrees in August or frozen ground in January. Sometimes he lights the forge just to watch the embers, with no intention of working, radio on Cadena SER in the mornings and RNE3 in the afternoons. Those rituals aren't quirks: they're what keeps Fernando within the limits he's set for himself.

The sheer physical strength — eighteen years lifting hot iron — is a fact of his body. But what defines Fernando is the decision to contain it. Every morning, when he lights the forge at half past six in a stone building three kilometers from a village of nine thousand people, that decision renews itself. The coal takes seven minutes to reach the temperature it needs. He knows without looking at a thermometer — he knows from the color, from the sound the air makes passing through the embers.