Conspiring Against Oblivion

This book is many things, but above all it is an exercise in memory that blends fiction with a fictionalized biography of the generation that was thirty years old when Francisco Franco died. The narrator and protagonist is Luis, and the story begins when, five years before the end of the century, he reunites with Eduardo, his first cousin, after twenty years apart. He finds him a prosperous businessman, an international trader, who invites him on a trip aboard a schooner from Monte Carlo to Barcelona to reminisce about when they were like brothers and to talk about the years they lost touch. Thus, under the command of Marián, the sailboat’s captain and a fascinating woman in the vein of Sappho of Lesbos, they embark on a journey through the Mediterranean and through memory. Both their families had emigrated from Alhama de Murcia to Barcelona. The lives of the two cousins ran parallel in childhood, and their biographies followed capricious paths that sometimes brought them closer and at other times almost definitively separated them. While Luis was educated at a Jesuit boarding school at the Labor University of Gijón, Eduardo learned on the streets and in the courtyard of the Jesuit school in Hostafrancs, only to be expelled from an elite school years later. The fickle winds of life sometimes separated them and sometimes brought them back together. They met again at SEAT, the largest Spanish company of the time, as the Franco regime waned and the labor movement began to gain strength despite repression, layoffs, and imprisonment. Later came freedom and the cousins’ dispersal: Luis started a family and left the metalworkers’ union to work at the university, while Eduardo devoted himself to making money and frequenting companies that were as profitable as they were dangerous. The novel blends several genres: the detective story of Eduardo’s disappearance, a close historical perspective on the transition to democracy, a chronicle of the strength and weakness of the labor movement, and the ravages of intelligence work. It also touches on eroticism and the new experiences of motherhood, offering a personal, courageous, and vibrant look at fifty years that changed the landscape, the lives of its protagonists, and those of the 21st century as well.