Galego | English

Young Adults

Rúa Carbón

By Marilar Aleixandre

About this book

Paula has three grandmothers, two in Donostia and another one in Vigo. When she is about to turn seventeen, Maite, her mother, tells her that Iñaki, her biological father was, along with her, a member of the political and military terrorist group ETA and that he died before Paula was born, when he was setting up a bomb in a car. The revelation of this secret and the holidays she spends in the Basque Country with her grandmothers Edurne and Nekane create a great shock in the life of Paula and she becomes entangled in a knot she does not know how to undo. This is the beginning of Rúa Carbón, a novel in which Marilar Aleixandre proposes the search for the father as a problematic axis through which the character moves from her teenage years to adulthood. This is a brave narration where the Basque political conflict becomes the background to speak about the search for complex individual and collective identities.

Book fragment

We will have to tell her someday. She is about to turn seventeen.

The voice of my father leaves me stuck at the kitchen door, with six biscuits with butter in one hand and a glass of milk in the other. Nine words breaking the night like a stone against a window pain. A stone stirring the quiet surface of a pond.

I am the only one who is going to turn seventeen in this house. Cristina is, as father says, a child, she is still a few months away from turning thirteen. What do they have to tell me? I kept my breath and I waited. I was not listening behind doors and it was not my fault that they spoke so loudly. It was past midnight and they must have thought I was in bed like a good girl or that I defied their recommendations regarding bedtime, listening to music at top volume with my headphones. The fact is that after listening to Trent res, while I studied the difference between molarity and normality for my Chemistry exam I felt hungry –selective hunger- and I went quietly to the kitchen to eat some biscuits with butter. Since they threatened to close the biscuit factory that makes my favourite biscuits my Mother became a food patriot and brought a huge box from the supermarket. This reminds me of the tricks I used as a child to delay the time to do my homework while I was reading.