The Pigs of Circe

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1973 · Authors: Luis Alemany

Luis Alemany, winner of the Canarias Literature Prize 2012, marked a true milestone with the publication in 1973 of Los puercos de Circe , the relentless portrait of an apathetic and self-satisfied society. In this excerpt, the ever-present Anaga massif takes centre stage.

«Because the bluish, indigo and brown peaks have always been there, from any moment that memory can encompass, marking the end of the city, an end that offers no possibility of continuing it except by drilling rocks, demolishing cliffs, climbing summits, the end that was once marked by the absurd building of the Nautical Club, and later fixed by the skeleton of the Nautical School, and then the silo tower and always, indifferently, the restaurants on the left side of the road where unexpected clients who turn out to be friendly and likeable are taken to dine, with prawns and limpets and crabs and clams and sardines and squid and octopus and. The stony end that we always find in front of us when we look up in the mid-afternoon from Plaza de España, or when driving along Méndez Núñez street heading to the Casa Sindical to meet with, or when going down the main road as the sun begins to set behind the other mountains, those behind us, and the sea shines fiercely and the Refinery floods the confined surface of the city with pestilential fumes, stained green from time to time, halted in the sea, preserving the same pine structure from the years of Nelson, the same slopes on which Viera y Clavijo could have travelled —he evidently must have travelled— dressed in his cassock, Humboldt killing time waiting for the car that was to take him to La Orotava [...]»

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