Zephyr and Cloud, Apollo and Daphne. Summer, a beach town, coming of age, shyness, school, Christmas winter, Easter, late sixties. Céfiro y Nube, a brevity that lends grateful agility to the narrative, in three parts divided into various short chapters, is fueled by the clash of “owl eyes” with the young hero’s unfulfilled desire, Céfiro y Nube tells us. From the hands of its author, poet and professor Juan Ramón Torregrosa from Alicante, a tale of gentle and gentle love without slow turbulence or lively hedonism.
In this short novel, sentences are the path to the sensual bubble evoked by the omniscient narrator, the secret galleries of the Makad soul, and Torregrosa traces certainties and uncertainties that do not come into conflict with them through a prose. It is like an echo, coming back to stay with the reader on every page, devoid of idiomatic loops, monotonous discursive rhythm, trivial phrases, stereotypes, naive lyricism. In the novel we find both the sharpness of a mirror and the mist of a loving mirage and the complicity of our destiny with the loneliness. Plain and uncluttered, the atmosphere created is ideal for the development of conflict that grades narrative tension.
Atmosphere
And Torregrosa describes the atmosphere, not the lost childhood, and follows what Fernando Pessoa affirms: “I find a deeper meaning in the aroma of sandalwood, in some old tin cans lying in a pile of dirt, in a fallen matchbox. rather than human tears, in two pieces of dirty paper rolling on a windy day and chasing each other in the street.” The plot focuses on a time period that corresponds to a break in routine through love, a fragment of life that belongs to some decisive moments, an accumulation of moments where the character can change his life, a laconic realism in the joy of life. an ergotistic ambiguity of love that reveals the hero’s intimacy, the stubborn beating of an inexperienced heartthrob.
At Céfiro y Nube, with a calm existence nourished by events that allow us to taste that monotonous existence shaken by emotional defiance, with a measured serenity without wandering, with a melancholy resignation, with a praise of everyday life, some traditions (San Juan is a fair with heifers, a Ferris wheel and bumper cars) , a portrait of era’s acts (festears), salvaged songs (Lili Marleen, Puppets on the String by Sandie Shaw, Michelle), and hit television series (Bonanza, Journey to the Bottom of the Sea), parties, and coop seats in the cinema. “Everything is in the past, I remember. And the present is sleepwalking”, as Nube’s memory obscures the protagonist, an Elementary Baccalaureate student at the Oleza school, to the point where it prevents him from noticing the significant change that has grown into “something intimate, disturbing, and profound” within him, “a sadness that isn’t entirely unpleasant, a restlessness”. At the age of fourteen, Céfiro, helpless in the face of inner forces, realizes that he is a prisoner of Nube, “imprinting him in his thoughts.”
This is a serene and solemn book of rather soft prose, filled with pronounced brushstrokes and bright descriptive words, and a lyrical breath that ensures that no distance is left between the exposed emotion and the center of the imagination. A pretty good introduction from the narrator of Torregrosa, whose new novel, El viaje de los salmones, is awaiting publication.