Galego | English

Fiction

Na derruba

By Paula Mariño Pazó

About this book

Na derruba is a narrative constructed on a world of thousands of beings who think, feel and move at the same rhythm as the reader. In an extraordinary and direct way, this first prose book by Paula Mariño presents a handful of twelve amazing short stories that allow the readers to move into worlds where only the imagination can go, but that exist in reality. The stories have the necessary verisimilitude and at the same time enough doses of fantasy so that they make us wonder, as if they were images being shown to our eye about the sense and changes of life.

Book fragment

Silence was terrifying. Her mother had locked her in her room for good. She was sitting on the bed, her feet hanging, the child could not understand anything. She came closer to the window and had a look through the bars. That difficult period, foreseeing what could happen -- her father had placed bars on all the windows in order to prevent burglars from entering the house.

In that way, the girl used to see her life go past, always divided by small bars, as if images could only be seen in a fragmented and incomplete way. The dogs, hidden under the shade of the opposite house, were not brown or black, they had stripes and they slept through the heat of the midday sun oblivious to their situation as a striped animal.

At night, her mother called her to the dining room. Catarina was wearing a dress, socks and shoes of the same colour as the lace on her hair, white. Her legs moved with difficulty towards the table. They had dinner in silence, they did not make any sound, not even with the spoons while eating the soup. The girl had lowered her head, and in her dark thoughts she did not dare looking at anyone. The sound of the maid’s petticoat’s was the only sound she could hear.