Galego | English

Fiction

Os meus ollos

By Ramiro Fonte

About this book

With a crystal clear and accurate prose and poetic eye, Ramiro Fonte takes us back to the time and place of his childhood, the Galician coastal village of Pontedeume in the 1960s. Os meus ollos (Vidas da infancia) is not just an exercise in getting back our individual and collective memory, it is also an essay on the experience of the durability of memory and those humble spaces we love so much. This is a captivating story in which the author uses emotion, piety and somehow irony, too, to recover the spaces neglected through the passing of time and give life back to dozens of real, popular characters as if they were historic figures. These individual stories show that the local is universal. This is a book about ordinary stories that is written with the same passion as those reference novels set in the past. This work shows how valid the sentence by Baudelaire still is “Genius is no more than an accurately formulated childhood”. This book also proves that childhood is not part of the journey but the whole journey.

Book fragment

I had just turned eleven when we left the village for the city. It was then that I learnt that one is never ready for that moment in which destiny takes our most precious things away from us. When this happens, nobody asks us. Better that way, because there is nothing we could answer anyway. We bleed inside because our roots are severed. We stand the pain. We do not open our mouths. Nobody can understand us. In a time we call the future, as if we were geographers naming blank spaces on maps, I make the decision to write about that loss. The pain does not hurt any more. The invisible blood of that wound nurtures my words.

I had turned eleven the first day of the local festival. The festival was over, my childhood was lost. It was just like that, all of a sudden. In the Mariñas dos Condes autumn comes without prior notice at the end of August. Calendars claim that these are summer days but that is not true. If we are lucky, the Atlantic storms have mercy on us and the sun rises triumphant over the mountains of Castelo and the festival of September brings the summer to an end with delusion.