Las palabras calladas / The silent words

It is February 2019 and Mathieu is stuck in Portbou, the final point of one of the routes of a Spanish Republican into exile before crossing the border. Mathieu, at the age of fifty-one, no longer wants to be an engineer, he wants to be a photographer; he would like, one day, to capture a spectacular image. Camera in hand, he strolls along the platforms of the storm-closed train station in search of that image. Through the lens, he sees a young homeless woman who does not let go of her trolley and a woman, with dishevelled hair and of unkempt appearance, having a coffee in the station bar. He doesn’t know it yet, but the young woman’s name is Esther, or Jessica, and she is a mother who fell ill for being a mother, stuck at the station, like him, on her way to Montpellier. Isabel, that’s the name of the woman with the tousled hair, who has just been evicted of her property and has been travelling in the motor home she has managed to salvage from bankruptcy, but which is now kept in a car park by order of the local police. She is also going to Montpellier to fulfil the promise she made to the only man she has ever loved.

They do not know it but they are united by that thin red line that bonds together misfortunes, heroism and loves during the wars; a thread that links their broken lives with the burial of a girl in the cemetery of Portbou in February of 1939.

A novel of characters, finely woven with a masterly structure and style, Las palabras calladas tells of the journey of the exiles, who escaped only to fall into new traps: misery, illness, slave labour, until living became “the most immoral of obligations”.