Love drives us to do reprehensible actions… perhaps stupid. Sometimes we cross the boundaries of the shame of others and ourselves. Love, or the universal emotion that drives us, leads us to the edge of stupidity and to engage in actions typical of people with poor mental health. But love really is the force that moves everything, and it’s one of the most universal themes in existence. Almost all works, whether literary or musical, theatrical, cinematographic or pictorial, are driven by love, whether secular or spiritual. The feeling of love is the source of all arts, and as such, many works have come to light thanks to this engine that pushes the artist to do his duty. Sometimes everything is pruned and their creation is born from here.
Published by Libros Indie with a foreword by Espido Freire, Bruno Francés Giménez’s Girl with an Umbrella is a product of love. It is this love that drives us to do reprehensible acts that has led Bruno to drive us into his madness. Consisting of eighty-three poems, the book is about a love story that emerged during the pandemic and died with it. According to Bruno, poems were written as a kind of automatic writing on paper napkins created every day at dawn, reflecting a boiling love without a filter of the mind.
The book opens with a poem that is a gateway to this illogicality: “At night I open my heart, / it is my window / let the candles flow in, / all but all, / into my soul, / a look that guides me / where before there was no light, / darkness where it is not even, / I, the motionless being, / the wounded death…» The hero of this collection of poems discovers a love that awakens him. Maybe the epidemic that magnifies everything creates the effect that great disasters have created on him, magnifying emotions. As in the forty-fourth poem: «I will steal a wave from the sea, / every night, / When no one sees me, / I will fill my heart with sand / With you, with your waves, with your foam, / with the scent of the tide // I will steal a wave from the sea, / every night, / when no one sees , / the stars from the bottom, / the watery skin from the surface…»
The umbrella girl speaks of a love that begins and ends strong. Not all love stories are eternal or have happy endings. Life itself takes us on strange paths. Love comes to us when we least expect it and shakes us up to make us change. Throughout the poetry collection, we see how the protagonist of this story develops emotionally. This is how the human being, the only animal who falls in love and gives everything to someone else, lives like this. The remaining species of the animal kingdom come together to reproduce only to survive. It is the man or the woman, with all the consequences, who loses the north for another and compels him to take actions such as writing a collection of poems.
Bruno Francés says in his last poem: «I don’t know, / I’m made of stone, mud, clay / a cold, dead, frozen heartbeat / when I breathe next to you, / your touch / less next to you, / I don’t know how you do it, / your voice is my notes , my songs / What I have given you / all my traces, my sky / my steps, my stumbles, my walk / no, I am not protecting myself from it … ». Love alienates us. That’s what The Umbrella Girl is about, a temporary alienation, that madness that we don’t all know about and that many would pay to feel at least once in their lives. Love is perhaps the most contagious disease, but it is one we all aspire to catch.