Domingo Villar hid two paradoxes that his noir readers were unaware of.
Author of police hits such as
La playa de los ahogados
, which accurately narrate the darkest part of the human being, the Galician author (Vigo, 50 years old) traces in
Some Complete Stories
(Siruela) a song to life and friendship.
"Both the stories and the linocuts are simple and share many common elements: irony, travel, superstition, the sea ... The stories that make up
Some complete stories
They were written to be read to my friends, with no other ambition than to find surprise and smile, but Carlos Baonza's engravings have allowed them to take a higher flight.
It is such a beautiful book that when I brought the first copy home, one of my children was reluctant to read it for fear that it would break.
Let's hope that the (bad) example does not spread ”, says Villar by email.
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This is how a 'best seller' of crime novels in Spanish is built
But, in addition, the complex plots of his novels or the more than 700 pages of
The Last Boat
they are, according to him, impossible.
Its terrain is the short space, the apparent simplicity.
“It is true that I am not able to write anything too long.
In my novels, the chapters are woven together by the plot, and the police investigation acts as an accelerator of the story.
Thus, from story to story, I find myself signing novels whose global extent I think I would not be able to cope because my strength would leave me.
The impulse that leads me to write always has the aim of climbing a step and not the entire ladder ”, he assures by way of explanation, an alibi that gives meaning to this narrative somersault.
We offer you one of the stories as a preview.
Carlos Baonza
That missionary had just left the novitiate and had little to do with the rest of the little fathers of the congregation.
He was tall, with light eyes and brown skin ... So handsome that, already at the first mass he celebrated, the impressed parishioners baptized him Don Andrés el Guapo.
The echo of the priest's beauty began to spread from ranchería to ranchería, and every Sunday more women responded to the ringing of the bells.
From all the slopes, young people came, dressed as if for a party, with painted lips and eyes, attracted by the beauty of Don Andrés.
Carlos Baonza
After a month there were so many admirers that they did not fit in the church.
It was said that all the women of the sierra were there.
Even those who were not believers or understood more than Nahuatl sat smiling on the first bench to look at Guapo.
The good old Don Andrés Taboada did not know what to do so that all that womanhood, instead of going to see the singer, would go to listen to his songs.
He decided to grow a beard and it was worse: the sighs were so deep that they were off center, and more than once he lost the thread in the homily.
Carlos Baonza
One morning, at the conclusion of the Eucharist, in view of the crowd that was waiting for him outside the temple, he sought shelter in the confessional.
He had more intention of taking a recess than to absolve anyone, although when he wanted to notice the line for confession he was leaving through the door of the church.
That Sunday he was until nightfall administering penance to the women.
The following Sundays too.
As the matter was to be with him, as the girls became sinless they began to invent them and, already stuck in flour, they tried to make him fall in love by recounting the details of their sinful exploits.
As much as El Guapo urged them to abbreviate, they would go off it all.
On one occasion a girl was even heard imploring: "Don't absolve me yet, Don Andrés, the best is coming right now."
Carlos Baonza
The priest resisted those confidences with difficulty, but those who could not bear them were the men of the sierra. One of those Sunday afternoons, four jealous husbands went in search of the Handsome and, in the same confessional, they put him through the knives. If his face was not disfigured, it was because a young woman prevented it at the cost of receiving a deep cut on the neck herself. The girl was narrowly saved. El Guapo died there.
When they stopped crying, the women took the corpse of the priest to a taxidermist. They intended to expose it dissected between Saint Ignatius and the Virgin of Guadalupe, but the bishop refused to place it there on the pretext that the churches of his diocese only welcomed images of saints, and Father Taboada, no matter how much insinuation he had resisted, was still to see if Rome would canonize him. This is the story of Don Andrés el Guapo as the old woman told us that night in the canteen. I don't know if it's true. Now the scar on his throat had it. We all saw it. You can believe that because it is so.