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Fiction

Lois e Helena buscándose un día de tormenta

By Manuel Veiga

About this book

Lois wakes up one day and discovers that his wife is not at home any more. She does not answer her phone either. The anguish of that unexpected loneliness, of that uncertainty and fear opens up as the feared conclusion approaches -- separation.

In a musical and bitting prose, Manuel Veiga (Monforte de Lemos, 1960) brings together in this novel the story of a man and a woman who look for each other and that of a city, a metaphor of present-day Vigo, which also wants to find itself and accept itself and its great achievements and misery, past and present. The novel was awarded the Premio García Barros in 2006.

Book fragment

Lois Depau woke up one day with his partly open mouth, his eyes full of sleep and his nose full of dry snot. In the bedside table the books of those last days: a maritime almanaque by Lloyds and a historic work on the marriage between Hitler and Eva Braun. He looked for the cold areas in the bed with his leg, and his wife was not there. He did not hear any noise in the kitchen either.

His wife, Helena (Helena Felicia Costa Estévez), had black hair; when she was a child and until late in her youth she used to boast of a thick ponytail. However, now she had changed and she liked a short bob, belle-époque style. When she turned forty, her face had taken on a rigid beauty, of an indigenous youth, which contrasted with her husband's white blondness. Some time ago, she had had her intrauterine device removed, which she had had for forty years, and she felt rancour against Depau, as he had never wanted to have children. He was oblivious of this rancour (...)

Her absence was strange, as not even once, since they had shared a bed, her gown and aerophagia, had she been missing. It was not due to loyalty, but because she could not stand sleeping in a different flat. She was afraid somebody may break in and brutally murder a sleeping woman.