Photography. RAE
Antonio Munoz Molina was born on a day like today from 1956, in Úbeda (Jaén). It's one of the great contemporary Spanish novelists, in addition to being an academic at the RAE, and director of the Cervantes Institute in New York for some years. So, to celebrate, I select a few fragments of his best known works as Beltenebros, The Polish Horseman o Plenilunio, one of my favorite novels.
beatus ille
You, who did not know that time, who had the right to lack memory, who opened your eyes when the war was already over and all of us had been condemned to shame and death for several years, exiled, buried, imprisoned in prisons or in the habit of fear. He loves literature as we are not even allowed to love it in adolescence, he looks for me, Mariana, Manuel from those years, as if we were not shadows but more true and living creatures than yourself. But it has been in his imagination where we have been born again, much better than we were, more loyal and beautiful, clean of cowardice and truth.
Beltenebros
I did my share of cruelty and destruction and deserved the shame. The effects of love or tenderness are fleeting, but those of error, those of a single error, never end, like a carnivorous disease without remedy. I have read that in the boreal regions, when winter arrives, the freezing of the surface of the lakes sometimes occurs suddenly, by a chance hit that crystallizes the cold, a stone thrown into the water, the tail of a fish that jumps out of it and when he falls a second later he is already trapped in the smoothness of the ice.
The Polish Horseman
They made me, they begot me, they bequeathed me everything, what they owned and what they never had, the words, the fear, the tenderness, the names, the pain, the shape of my face, the color of my eyes, the feeling of never having left Magina and seeing her get lost far away, in the depths of the night.
Warrior ardor
Ever since I knew where my bad luck had destined me, I would buy the newspaper every morning or turn on the radio or television at the time of the news with a keen presentiment of alarm and sometimes fear: bombs exploded almost daily and government officials were killed. army, police and civil guards, and you would always see a corpse lying on the sidewalk in the middle of a pool of blood and poorly covered by a gray blanket, or fallen against the back of the back seat of an official car, its mouth open and blood dripping on his face, a pulp of torn flesh and brain mass behind the glass frosted and shattered by the gunshots.
Plenilunio
Almost without realizing it, he had begun to caress her while they spoke in a low voice, as slowly as she warmed up, her very cold feet tangled with hers, and as he followed with his now more sensitive and audacious fingers the touch of skin and fingers. familiar sinuosities that he sought and recognized later with his lips, he remembered again, now without fear or shame, only with sweetness, almost with gratitude, of the erotic dreams of fourteen years, and it seemed to him that he saw her as she was now himself and how it had been the first time male eyes saw her naked. He was losing everything, shedding everything, just as when she undressed she had dropped her panties and bra on the floor and had approached him as if emerging from the abandoned and useless garments, falling at his feet with a sound of gauze. There was no urgency, no uncertainty, no gestures of fever or eager brutality. He could see her swinging, upright, settling slowly on top of him, her hair over her face, mingled with shadow, her shoulders back, her two hands gripping her thighs.