The duel

Among the novels ‘Happy beings’ and ‘Life Time’ spent five years. With them the wear, illness and death of a father, the painter Juan Giraralt, whose story his son gave us Marcos Giraralttissue yours. In that overwhelming book, the writer did not intend to be confessional, or autobiographical. It did not intend anything except literature itself. His was a simple, direct and powerful prose, made of the pure words of the duel.

The duel? Yes, that air propeller that leaves life when it goes, that last breath that flies a room when someone, finally rests. I think of the ‘Life Time’ pages under the sun of a spring morning. I think of that story before the metal urn where my own father’s ashes rest, Carlos Sainz Muñozson of Spanish Republicans who was born in Barcelona, ​​heading to France, and died in Madrid three days ago.

My father, Spanish by birth and Venezuelan of choice. My father, who arrived at the port of La Guaira in 1947 with nine years and an inexperienced Spanish. In Vichy’s France, Spanish would be the least relevant to languages. Exiled from a very young age, my father’s life time passed on both sides of the Atlantic: between Spain to which their parents did not want to return and the Venezuela to which some of their children cannot return.

Of his years in Pissac, the town seven kilometers from Bordeaux where my father grew up with the prohibition of singing the ‘Marseille’, my father retains frayed, unconnected memories, war memories. Very alive in his heart, however, almost printed with the fire of whom he chooses, the prints of Venezuela remained that land that was not his, but his land ended up being; the country where he married an extraordinary woman and where he grew up four children; That of which he was stripped – I sorry, Dad, not being able to recover from the hands of the revolution the hacienda that you loved so much – and that kept in his memory until the last exhalation. Our life time, Dad, like that of that book by Marcos Giralt, is the transfer. It is this March morning. It is this sun that covers us. It is this duel that surrounds us.