Cover of the novel Panza de burro.Editorial Barrett
Donkey belly
(Editorial Barrett) by Andrea Abreu is a novel as full of beauty as it is hard.
Full of innocence, discovery, truth, and imagination.
The protagonist and her friend move through their neighborhood and on their island between two types of house that are, in reality, two almost opposite worlds: the mountain of self-built houses where they live and the houses for tourists, that their mother clean.
His house:
“Navy blue, pink, yellow, more yellow, burnt yellow, fried egg yellow written with G and umlauts, red.
This is how the houses in the neighborhood were, of many colors, like the Ludo squares.
Of all the colors already half started, half finished, but none complete, they were houses like incomplete monsters.
Almost all with some part without liming, with the blocks uncovered, with the blocks with mojo and humidity.
Almost all built by its own inhabitants.
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The revelation author who is not afraid of the RAE
Stone by stone, block by block.
Almost all illegal.
Almost all distributed by families: the burned, the fists, the güeveros, the Cadians, the horses, the Chinese, the fajineros, the blacks.
Like little birds that build nests close to each other, one on top of the other, to protect themselves.
And besides, everything steep.
A vertical neighborhood on a vertical hill covered with low clouds, all furrowed by a very long horizontal cave, which went to the top and went down to the sea, like the mantle of the Virgin of Candelaria, the most beautiful, the darkest.
The writer Andrea Abreu. Rafael Avero / El País.
The first houses in the neighborhood starting from the top had the roofs and roofs full of pine cones and many times it seemed that instead of houses made by people they were houses of witches and goblins.
The rest of the neighborhood, which were not houses, was all dark green, the color of the mountain.
My house was a mountain of many houses built over the house of my great-grandmother Edita, the only legal one, the only one with a number.
As my house was made up of many houses, we had to coordinate to put the TV on and cook.
If we lit two ovens at the same time, the light would jump.
If my father, my mother and grandmother and my grandmother's brother, Uncle Ovid, and I, who were all the people who lived in that house, turned on all our TVs at the same time, I felt that the house exploded and flew out of the air ".
The rural houses:
“I liked them and I didn't like the rural houses, I mean: I liked them because they were beautiful but I didn't like them because between them and me there was like a huge wall of transparent kitchen paper, filmed paper, which would not let me participate in the best things about the rural houses. The rural houses were on the street next to my street, El Paso del Burro. The rural houses were to blame for the days when my mother did not have to go south to clean hotels, she had to clean rural houses and we could not go to the beach and that is why I did not like rural houses either. If I wanted to be with my mother, I had to go with her to clean the rural houses, but cleaning the rural houses bored me. She sometimes told me to stay here quietly playing and I would stay and I felt like a deep emptiness inside my stomach,and I was sad, but if she told me you have to help me clean the rural houses and she wouldn't let me play, then I didn't feel happy either, because I hated cleaning the rural houses. When I grew up I wanted to be a paper secretary, not a cleaner " .
