The House of the Spikes

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1998 · Authors: Luis León Barreto

Luis León Barreto (Los Llanos de Aridane, 1949) published in 1998 "La Casa de los Picos", a novel about the peculiar house that was built on the San Roque cliff.

«It was hardly anything more than a structure in agony and its broken walls, the seven windows without glass, its faded flaming decorations and the moth-eaten floorboards peeling the roof into shavings, were pitiful.

For decades they had remained sheltered in the shadows; their substance did not disintegrate because their framework was of air, and that condition was enough to preserve their energy. Conscientious and patient, the two men prepared for the ritual of installing their equipment, threading cables and placing microphones. Days later, amid the creaking of the wood and the whistles of the wind, they believed they heard the organist's prayers, even the complaints of his decrepitude and the helplessness he suffered in the last years of his life. And other nights they would affirm that the faint echo of Xácome de Coimbra was coming to them amid the persecutions and vendettas that had devastated his good fortune, Madame Odile lamented her sorrows, Horacio Andrade let out his scream on the dawn he was stabbed and the Pesquisidor only had silences of pain, powerless to see death in hiding.» [...]

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