‘Tribute to your silence’, by Paloma Caro: Secrets and Reconciliation

Both immerse us in a plot in which secrets are hidden that we will gradually discover. In his latest novel, ‘Tribute to your silence’, which develops in Tetuán, Madrid andTangieralso Enigmas appear and family silences that contain multiple and surprising consequences: «I will never know why a discussion, a single phrase or a single look of a specific day They can change forever coexistence in a house ».

It is structured in three parts, each of them focused on different moments of the life of its protagonists, and located in a specific temporal framework. Thus, ‘The story of Julia’ (1963-1986), narrated in the first person; ‘The story of Emma’ (1957-1961), in third; and ‘Tribute to your silence’ (2018), shorter part, entitled as the work as a whole and where Julia’s narrator voice becomes, as in the epilogue. The tribute to which Julia yields to her mother Emma, ​​her two protagonists. They are very different, The first rebel and independentand the second sacrificed and silent, and its relationship was not exactly easy.

After the death of his motherJulia has lived free without thinking about yesterday. But three decades after death, in a banal conversation with Dalia, sister of her mother, she reveals something, which is a bomb: «I had exploded in my face […]. My past, of course, had not been the one I believed, and my future seemed to be the expected one, ”says Julia. The rupture of silence On the part of Dalia is the trigger that drives Julia to unravel the reason for her mother’s behavior, to understand her character,

Paloma Caro traces in Julia and Emma some solid characters, Accompanied by others – Salvador, Dalia, Claudia … – well outlined, and manages to wrap ourselves in an emotional reconciliation story, guided by the maximum of André Malraux that heads the novel, and that invites us, to the thread of the concrete story that We are told in ‘Tribute to your silence’, to reflect: «If we really could understand, we could no longer judge».