Today Camilo José Cela He would have turned 102 years old, but he left us in 2002. However, the most universal Galician writer, journalist, essayist, editor and academic and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1989 (and the Cervantes in 1995 among many others) continues to live for posterity in all his works. So I remember it in a selection of phrases and passages of Pascual Duarte's family. The reason? A shocking fragment of that work marked my future reader and writer self.
The reason
It was in one of those reading books (Senda, from Santillana) from I don't remember exactly the course, maybe in 5th or 6th grade EGB. And when, in those times little political and linguistic correctness and less cigarette paper, the children in the school read whatever it was that we had to read. It was just a fragment, maybe one of the hardest of the many it has Pascual Duarte's family.
Possibly it remained in my memory because of the language, so adult and harsh, and certainly because of the image that I recreated when I read it. I know what a shotgun is and how you kill with it, I also know what it is to have a dog. It also unconsciously marked my future self as both a reader and a writer, this facet where I am not alien to male first person narrator nor its hardness or fierceness. It was the scene in which Pascual Duarte shoots his bitch.
12 phrases of Pascual Duarte's family
So there it goes phrase selection of this novel published in 1942, One summit works of its author, but also of the Spanish narrative of the twentieth century.
1.
It kills without thinking, I have it well proven; sometimes, unintentionally. You hate yourself, you hate yourself intensely, fiercely, and you open the razor, and with it wide open you reach, barefoot, to the bed where the enemy sleeps.
2.
All mortals have the same leathers at birth and yet, when we grow up, fate takes pleasure in changing us as if we were wax and in going down different paths to the same end: death.
3.
Ideas that upset us never suddenly arrive; the sudden drowns out a few moments, but leaves us, as we go, long years of life ahead. The thoughts that drive us crazy with the worst madness, that of sadness, always arrive little by little and as without feeling, as without feeling the fog invades the fields, or the consumption of the breasts.
4.
The sun was going down; its last rays were going to be nailed on the sad cypress, my only company. It was hot; A few tremors ran through my body; I could not move, I was nailed as from the look of the wolf.
5.
Things are never as we imagine them at first sight, and so it happens that when we begin to see them closely, when we begin to work on them, they present us with such strange and even unknown aspects that, from the first idea, they sometimes do not even leave us even the memory; such happens with the faces that we imagine.
6.
You don't get used to misfortune, believe me, because we always have the illusion that the one we are enduring the last one has to be, although later, as time goes by, we begin to convince ourselves - And with what sadness! - that the worst is yet to happen ...
7.
I would be doing something else, any of those that most men do - without noticing -; He would be free, as most of the men are free -without noticing either; God knows how many years of life ahead of him, as they have - without realizing that they can spend them slowly - most of the men ...
8.
It is a pity that the joys of men never know where they will lead us, because if we did, there is no doubt that some displeasure that others would have to spare us; I say this because the evening at the Rooster's house ended like the rosary of dawn, for that reason none of us knew how to stop on time. The thing was very simple, as simple as the things that most complicate our lives always turn out to be.
9.
There is a lot of difference between adorning your meats with blush and cologne, and doing it with tattoos that no one has to erase afterwards.
10.
The greatest tragedies of men seem to arrive without thinking, with their step, of a cautious wolf, to strike us with their sudden and devious sting like that of scorpions.
11.
If my condition as a man had allowed me to forgive, I would have forgiven, but the world is as it is and wanting to move against the current is nothing but a vain attempt.
12.
He beat me by word of mouth, but if we had ended up coming to blows I swear to you on my dead that I would kill him before he touched a hair on me. I wanted to cool off because I knew my character and because from man to man it is not good to fight with a shotgun in hand when the other does not have it.