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Fiction

Non sei cando nos veremos

By Anxo A. Rei Ballesteros

About this book

This is a novel in which spoken language and direct recollection, with a precise and firm tone, combine and thus criticise today's morals and lifestyles.

The main character in the novel tells his story of a life of plenitude and deception, failure and hope. From jail and with a direct tone that does not want to hide anything, the narrator confesses to his daughter his personal reality, starting with his school years at a religious school and then at university in Santiago de Compostela, until he starts describing his experience during the brutal repression exercised by the Triple, a groups in Argentina during the military coup. This is a novel in which life and death are expressions of the same experience, are two faces of the same reality in which the pleasures of the flesh go hand in hand with torture and extinction.

Rei Ballesteros brings together amazement and irony, order and disorder, time as creator and destroyer, and thus he conveys the intensity of a convoluted existence to the readers. There is great balance between the narrative form and the intensity of the world in which the narration takes place, and this is a sign of a great writer.

Book fragment

Listen, my daughter, as you sound so interested, at least one thing should be clear between the two of us: I was never in love with your mother, right? Never, I said. Not even at the beginning of our relationship. Did you hear that? I must have been eighteen years old then. Eighteen years. Anyway, Marcial and I were in front of the cafeteria at our faculty, having a drink, rum and coke, “cubalibres”. (At that time we still didn't use the word “cubata”). We were far from being drunk. Just that... tipsy... a little bit high. In the mood.

Suddenly two girls come and sit in the table right next to us. Ok, ok.

Rosa and Teresa; Teresa and Rosa: the order didn’t matter much.

What I want to tell you is: what the hell.

Ok. Let's be clear. I was not in love with anyone in particular.

I just needed... well, you know... that, you know already, to do it: to shag, get laid, whichever way you want to call it. (I hate that expression ‘to make love’). Erotic curiosity, was then for me -- could you believe it? -- something more urgent (and important) than anything else in the world.

And that is the fact.