Portrait of Marlou Diesel

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 2004 · Authors: Marcelino Rodríguez Marichal

The writer Marcelino Rodríguez Marichal (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1957), in his book Portrait of Marlou Diesel , offers a powerful account of the life of a night-shift taxi driver. For years the author himself worked in this profession and thus, sometimes imitating reality and other times inventing it, he undertook the project of novelising the existence of characters who, whether from the back seat or while driving, talk and talk without stopping. Many of the journeys are set in the streets of Santa Cruz.

«-- Avenida Anaga, please -- says the passenger.

From nine to five in the morning I sit behind the wheel of my Datsun Bluebird, taking people from one place to another. But if it were only about that, just carrying their bodies. I also carry their complaints, their conflicts, the weariness that clouds their lives, their small worlds. They have the habit of telling everything inside the car. To impregnate, with that unmistakable smell of fatality, even the car upholstery. People get out leaving part of that painful material behind. I know several colleagues who ended up with crossed wires, in a mental hospital, for taking that matter of the back seat very seriously.»

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