Pedro García Cuartango: Domingo Villar, the light before dusk

I had even forgotten the dedication, drawn with a black marker: «For my friend Pedro G. Cuartango, this Singgator for the Baixas Rías, our common paradise. With the love of always. Domingo Villar. 2019 ». When I gave me the printed volume, I had already read the first draft. He had suggested that he cut 200 pages, knowing that he was not going to pay attention to me.

‘The last ship’ is the last of the three novels of Domingo Villar and, also, the one I like the most. Above ‘The beach of the drowned’, whose scenarios were familiar to me not only because we shared them every August but because he had explained to me how that novel was forged in his mind. On one occasion, he taught me the house on the Mount Lourido where one of the protagonists of the narrative lives.

The gestation of ‘The last ship’ was as slow as laborious, full of doubts and ups and downs. He was starting ‘Stone Cruces’, but changed his mind. It took five years to finish it. He did and undone the chapters, rewrite them, changed order and devised new scenes. On our walks, I told him that the difference between a journalist and a writer is that the first works with a term: the closure. He reproached him for his conscientious thoroughness and urged him to deliver the text to Siruela, his editorial. Fortunately, he didn’t pay attention to me either.

Domingo Villar was a perfectionist, a boom craftsman, an author who ruminated the plots before starting to write. Nothing remained the Albur of inspiration even though he did not miss imagination and talent. Inside, he linked the merit of the effort, something paradoxical that he concealed after his bonhomy and his affable character, which showed a ‘carpe diem’ in his gestures.

‘The last ship’ is a work that fits in the canons of the black novel in background. It tells the disappearance of Dr. Andrade’s daughter, a renowned doctor, who disappears after taking the ship that joins Moaña with Vigo. The doctor commission the investigation to Inspector Leo Caldas, who soon discovers that things are not as they seem while deepening a dark plot.

The novel is a tour of the Ría de Vigo, on places as wonderful as the village of Tiran, its church and its cemetery, the streets and parks of Vigo, the choice, its favorite restaurant, the world of fishermen and the suffocating atmosphere built around the missing woman’s house.

Domingo insisted on several occasions that we did the same route as the victim of his book, drew a sketch of the place of action on a napkin and told me about the genesis of his characters. We could never carry out the plan because he died suddenly, a few days after one of our long walks through the Chamartín neighborhood.

It was a day of August of the year of his death when his wife and friends took the last ship from Moaña to Vigo. We were sitting in a petril of the Church of Tiran, we throw flowers into the sea and listen to the sound of the bells at sunset. At that time, we all thought about listening to their voice in a disturbing silence.

‘The last ship’ is not just the literary testament of Domingo Villar. It is also the radiography of a territory, of a physical space, of a sentimental paradise that he alluded to in his dedication. And it is a declaration of principles of the moral code that governed its existence. It is not necessary to know him much to intuit that Inspector Leo Caldas was his alter ego.

The best black novels, and I think of Hammett and Chandler, have a moral breath that is always present in Domingo Villar’s work, a friend who made the world better and that helped us love the life he enjoyed so much. We have their books and the memories of those walks through Madrid and Playa América, where we talk about Celta, Cunqueiro and the wines of Galicia without knowing that the last ship was about to leave.