During his youth in Puerto de la Cruz, on Tenerife’s north coast, a school primer moment etched itself into memory. A priest overseeing his education rebuked the boy before his peers for slipping into poor academic performance. The class’s loud chorus declared thatJuan Cruz Ruiz risked losing his scholarship because he lived in poverty. That harsh reminder became a cruel watermark of the post-war Canary Islands. The boy’s quiet counterstroke was a relentless pursuit of knowledge, reading until his name appeared on the school hall of fame, and then reading some more. And so the habit began, steady and unyielding.
Juan Cruz Ruiz, a journalist, writer, and poet born in 1948, has long been a central figure in Canary and Spanish letters. He served as vice-president of the publishing group Pensa Ibérica, a position he held since late February, and has spent a lifetime writing from the start. At one point, he copied Rudyard Kipling’s poem If onto a wall mural in his home, accompanied by Jacinto Miquelarena’s Spanish translation. That act sits at the edge of a larger narrative: the forthcoming novel One Thousand Two Hundred Steps. Published by Alfaguara, the book merges autobiography, memory, and fiction to illuminate a particularly dark period in Spain’s history. “This is the most serious and important thing I’ve ever written,” he notes.
73 year old boy
Cruz introduces One Thousand Two Hundred Steps to audiences in a Barcelona bookstore, surrounded by friends, readers, and supporters who share the space with a chorus of fellow enthusiasts. The veteran writer describes the moment with a mix of warmth and candid humor, inviting the crowd to share in the laughter and the memory. The scene features Olga Merino and journalist Alex Salmon from the Canary Islands, who recall the author’s childhood as a lens through which to examine fear, resilience, and the power of words and friendship.
The novel grew out of a haunting memory: the image of a neighborhood kid who bangs his head against the wall of an orchard until the blood leaves a trail. The author explains that the book seeks to tell the story of children who experience brutal fun within a cruel world. It portrays a life shaped by poverty, where happiness is not fully understood because it remains out of reach. The author emphasizes that those were not unhappy children, but they did not yet know what happiness looked like.
The author argues that Spanish society has not fully analyzed the post-war era and the lingering effects seen in remote neighborhoods. The post-war period stretched for so long that part of history risked becoming background noise. He points to contemporary far-right rhetoric as an example of how people react to the very idea of deportation. The memory matters because there were days when those kids could have been anyone, anywhere, growing up in a region scarred by poverty. This is the essence of One Thousand Two Hundred Steps.
Twelve hundred steps
Juan Cruz Ruiz
Editorial Alfaguara
Pages 216
Price 18.9 €