"Dear Naomi" "Yesterday I went back to the town where I grew up." "My grandparents are buried here and so is one of my best friends." "I didn't go to visit their graves." "They taught me how to pray but later I forgot how to do it." "In a country like this it's easy to believe in everything or in nothing." "This is the museum where I was educated." "We used to come here on excursions." "There was no art museum so we learned to draw from the bodies mummified by the famous" "19th-century taxidermist Francesc Darder." "In 1 990 the museum was refurbished and most of my memories now slumber in the storeroom or in the archives." "Here is where I learnt the art of disguising myself in order to survive and the names of bizarre animals that I have recently seen alive." "This lion attacked Darder and his dog saved him." "Darder had them both stuffed and now they stand side by side." "This is how we learned the meaning of heroism and all its consequences." "Darder's most famous exhibit was the stuffed body of a black man:" "a bushman who was the first black man we had ever seen in the village." "When I was a child bodies from all over the world were displayed around him." "In 1992 the Olympic Games were held in Barcelona and people complained that the display of the black man was racist." "During the drawn-out controversy nobody bothered about the mummies foetuses or preserved skins of other races." "The "Negro of Banyoles"" "was buried in Botswana in the midst of a great drought." "The museum decided to close the human specimen gallery and to keep all the exhibits in the storerooms." "In fact it was here that I first saw a Japanese person." "And I remember another foreigner associated th a kind of love story:" "during the Civil War a German pilot performed acrobatics over the lake to seduce an enemy girl." "The plane crashed into the lake." "When I was a child they found the wreckage and people say that the altimeter read zero metres and that the clock inside the plane had stopped at the exact time of impact." "Nobody knows anything about the girl." "If you visit I promise to show you the secrets of the lake." "In a place like this it's easy to believe in nothing or in everything."