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Fiction

Amor de tango

By Mª Xosé Queizán

About this book

In Amor de tango María Xosé takes us back to Vigo during the 2nd Republic and the repression of Franco’s dictatorship through the memories of Margot, one of its main characters. This is a novel about the women who, during the 20s and 30s, were active young women full of hopes and ready to change the world. This is a novel about the workers that became adults in that liberal pioneering Atlantic city that was Vigo before the civil war. This is a novel about the workers in the sardine canning factories so closely linked to the industrial development of the city and the sea surrounding it. This is a novel of cruisers, of salting factories, of the Eastern Telegraph Company, of large shipping companies, of immigration, of the harbour of O Berbés. It is a memory of Vigo, an intimate and personal story, told with delicate realism, of the Vigo that these women inhabited.

Book fragment

Margot takes a look at the frames in the film, photo grams, they are now called, but in the past they used to be called frames, and her eyes follow Marlon Brando. She carefully stares at him. The queue to buy the tickets for the cinema is crowded. This is not just any other film. This is Last Tango in Paris, she has heard so much about it and some people have even gone abroad to see it. Now, as the regime is opening up, previously forbidden films are being screened and porno magazines are available at the tobacconist. She looks at Marlon Brando and feels that he is a little bit worn out, she wishes she could have had him in New York harbour when he worked in the dock, a rebel then, with his mariner’s cap, On the Waterfront, she thinks it was called, there he was really hot! But in this one, how much he has changed! He is fat as a pig and his face bulges, it must be that life he leads, these people in films lead such lives… He surely drinks, you can tell. But despite all that he is still attractive. His mouth especially, so fleshy and sensual, with that dismissive gesture sometimes, a hard man, and baby-like some other times, but a bold and lustful one. Yes, she had to acknowledge that that grimace was a little bit disgusting. Maybe because of that grimace he was chosen for this film.