Galego | English

Theatre

Limpeza de sangue

By Rubén Ruibal

About this book

Limpeza de sangue (o sangue fai ruído) by Rubén Ruibal was awarded the 2005 Álvaro Cunqueiro Award for stage play. The main characters, Fernando and Pantaleón, come from apparently opposing worlds but meet while waiting for a transplant or their inevitable death, at the dialysis room of a hospital. The situation makes them equals and they are forced to keep each other company. This helps them get to know other aspects of life that their daily routines had not allowed them to pay attention to so far. An unprecedented friendship emerges, while everything around them becomes the rigid, prejudicial environment in which they have to survive which not even a stolen innocent proposal of The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain will open a new door.

Book fragment

A strange hangar, a wide old and untidy entrance in an old modern building that could be a garage but for the glass and rubbish on the floor. The only light they see is that rejected by the street from the far off lampposts. The only sound is a gentle breeze that opens the cracks in the walls and fills the spaces between columns; then the echoing steps desecrating that cloister-like place, that decaying church where all we can see are paintings, forever appearing and fading away.. The steps are Fernando’s, the shade of a young man, lean and sick, who comes closer to an opening on the wall through which the light passes and starts looking ahead. He is angry, he kicks, before he stops, a tin or stone: the noise wakes up a sleeping shadow. It is Clemente, who speaks, knowing that he is going to scare him from the dark that protects him.

Clemente: Want a fag?

Fernando: Fucking hell!

Clemente: Ten cents.

Fernando: Clemente! Holy shit!

Clemente: Nice way of saying hi!