Guad

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1970 · Authors: Alfonso García-Ramos

Alfonso García-Ramos y Fernández del Castillo (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1930-La Laguna, 1980) was a writer and journalist who came to direct the newspaper La Tarde . After publishing some early literary works, it was in 1971 with the publication of his novel Guad (with which he obtained the previous year the “Benito Pérez Armas Prize”) that he achieved great recognition as an author of modern and aesthetic resources, marking the beginning of the renewal of postwar Canarian narrative.

This novel has a realistic narrative structure where both the action and the characters appear clearly, drawn without ambiguities or secrets, although that selected reality transcends mere costumbrist depiction. The novel tells the life of the workers in the island’s water galleries, and alludes to their relationship with the petty economic network that manipulates that essential wealth.

In a fragment of the novel, it refers to the houses of the Santa Cruz neighbourhood of El Cabo with these lines: 

«Never has the capital been so large, unknown, disconcerting and contradictory. Never viewed with more fear, with that fear that put an uncontrollable tremor in the finger each time it pressed the doorbell of the houses where he hoped to obtain a signature for the document commissioned by Don Jesús.

Fortunately, he entered on the right foot. It was in one of those houses in the El Cabo neighbourhood of miserable appearance, low-roofed and with bulging walls painted red. He prepared for the worst, for those sullen faces of the owners and the unpleasant phrases, but he had done nothing more than cross the door when he was taken by the first surprise: behind the exterior abandonment, the house hid its comfortable and well-kept intimacy.»

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