The protagonists of *Primera memoria*—Matia, Borja, and Manuel—do not want to stop being children. They are adolescents on the edge of the abyss of adulthood, afraid to look out but aware that they have no alternative, that they have no choice but to do so. Their time is up. And what little they had left is consumed by a war that has just broken out and that stretches, in the distance, and overshadows everything. "Anyone who has not been, from the ages of nine to fourteen, attracted and carried from one place to another, from one hand to another, like an object, will not be able to understand my lack of love and rebellion of that time," says an adult Matia, remembering the Matia of then, a girl with scraped knees, full of rage, banished by paternal abandonment on an island whose name is never pronounced. In that long summer of thirty-six, and under the watchful eye of her grandmother, she and her cousin Borja, a sly and charismatic fifteen-year-old boy, shell out a summer routine made of lazy Latin lessons, cigarettes smoked in secret, and boat trips to the island's hidden coves. Their little secrets and evils, the glimpse of the complexity of the adult world, have in Manuel, the eldest son of a family marginalized by all towards whom Matia feels an attachment that she cannot define, a sounding board that shatters the fragile alliance of convenience of the two cousins. *Primera memoria* begins the trilogy *Los mercaderes*, conceived years ago in three volumes. The second is titled, according to a verse by Salvatore Quasimodo, *Los soldados lloran de noche*, and the third, *La trampa*.
Primera memoria
Year
1959
Pages
242
Description
The protagonists of *Primera memoria*—Matia, Borja, and Manuel—do not want to stop being children. They are adolescents on the edge of the abyss of adulthood, afraid to look out but aware that they have no alternative, that they have no choice but to do so. Their time is up. And what little they had left is consumed by a war that has just broken out and that stretches, in the distance, and overshadows everything. "Anyone who has not been, from the ages of nine to fourteen, attracted and carried from one place to another, from one hand to another, like an object, will not be able to understand my lack of love and rebellion of that time," says an adult Matia, remembering the Matia of then, a girl with scraped knees, full of rage, banished by paternal abandonment on an island whose name is never pronounced. In that long summer of thirty-six, and under the watchful eye of her grandmother, she and her cousin Borja, a sly and charismatic fifteen-year-old boy, shell out a summer routine made of lazy Latin lessons, cigarettes smoked in secret, and boat trips to the island's hidden coves. Their little secrets and evils, the glimpse of the complexity of the adult world, have in Manuel, the eldest son of a family marginalized by all towards whom Matia feels an attachment that she cannot define, a sounding board that shatters the fragile alliance of convenience of the two cousins. *Primera memoria* begins the trilogy *Los mercaderes*, conceived years ago in three volumes. The second is titled, according to a verse by Salvatore Quasimodo, *Los soldados lloran de noche*, and the third, *La trampa*.
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