Many years have passed since José Luis Garci put the script of a movie in a drawer that, according to his plans,
would have Paul Newman and Tom Cruise in the cast
.
"It was a suspenseful plot, very much in the line of Hitchcock", assures Luis Herrero, a friend of the filmmaker.
"A few summers ago, I was completely stuck writing a novel. That's when he offered to give me that story for free. It fascinated me and I started writing it. Garci hasn't read it yet."
After selling more than
100,000 copies
of his previous titles published in La Esfera de los Libros to date, the journalist and writer returns with
Where the earth is finished
, a fast-paced fiction set in Finisterre.
Here, a preview.
The journalist and writer Luis Herrero in the newsroom of El Mundo.ÁNGEL NAVARRETE
Lira, near Finisterre. Dec 17, 2019
That Tuesday in December the sky was not in a good mood.
The west wind was dragging a blanket of ash-colored clouds towards the coast and the light of the dawn found little room to overcome the darkness.
From time to time, a few flashes of light colored small nimbus mother-of-pearl.
But they were fleeting reflections.
Then the clearings closed again and the cloud cover would darken again.
David McFarlan, standing on the wet sand of Lira Beach, tried to rescue the colors that his memory stored from the gloom.
As he closed his eyes, the cobalt gray of the sea turned navy blue.
The blackened silver foam ridges turned white as salt, and the cliffs of rock began to glow like apricot kernels.
When he opened them again, everything returned to the color of polished steel.
Then the words of Abbot Ishmael came to his head: "Of the gifts that nature gives to man, none is comparable to that of the radiant light of the sun."
As he evoked the ancient priest of Muxía, a feeling of anguish mixed with a painful contraction in the pit of his stomach washed over him.
Some of his advice still struggled to shape the dictation of his conscience.
"Nothing works," he said the first time they spoke, "but you have to get up every morning with the hope that everything can change."
It took a faith that McFarlan did not have to accept that pattern of conduct.
Three years had already passed since he arrived in that village that overlooked the edge of the known land and he knew that the days of light and the nacre clouds were brief intervals of a sun that always ended up devoured by darkness.
Things do not change, sooner or later they return to their destination.
That implacable law was what led him to the place that the Greeks called the land of the dead.
Cynthia Donaldson, the woman who had lit up the best two years of her life, died because of him.
He killed her.
Its glow was lost in the shadows.
Suddenly, Cynthia's voice clambered into the surf and her imaginary body sprang from the dike where the water rose.
He saw her with the face of an owl and the body of a woman, as if she were the meiga of ill omen that announces to those who see her the arrival of her own death.
For him, however, his vision did not herald a tragic fate.
It no longer made any sense to cling to life.
The only love that mattered to him was waiting for him on the other side of the mirror.
"Post mortem dileximus," he said aloud.
The first time Cynthia told him about Finisterre, she explained that when the earth was flat, the world ended there.
Souls went to sea in search of eternal life aboard ships that fell into the abyss of nowhere.
McFarlan removed the sheet from the typewriter cart and read the last sentence of the text: "The gray winds, the cold winds blow where I go."
And then further down: "End".
He pushed aside the shotgun that held the stack of typed pages, caught them with both hands to keep them from spilling, and set them in front of him.
He placed the page he had just reread at the end of the pile and, in pencil, changed the title that appeared on the first of all.
He crossed out
Waiting for you
and wrote
Where the earth ends
.
Then he took his dog Dickens into the kitchen.
"You are the most loyal unfaithful friend I have ever had," he said as he caressed her neck with the palm of his hand.
Before locking him in, he opened the refrigerator door.
When he returned to the living room, he searched his vinyl collection for the album
What a Wonderful World
and let the voice of Louis Armstrong bring enough courage to his spirit to be able to consummate the established plan.
The photographs resting on the chimney crosspiece - John Kennedy Toole, Virginia Woolf, Allan Poe, John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, and a smiling young David McFarlan - stared at him with a gesture of strange complicity.
Finally she picked up the Browning with the nickel-plated scale, made sure that the hairpin she had carved into the fig branch fit snugly on the trigger, sat in one of the armchairs facing the fireplace, and placed the shotgun on her lap.
Sergeant Cabaleiro stopped his run down the beach when he heard the sound of the shot.
The cormorants that were perched on the rocks took flight, startled by the detonation and disappeared into the mist.
Their squawks drowned out Dickens's distant barks.
Then an eyelet of clarity, like the sore of a thrown in the sky, pierced the cloud cover and a stream of light spilled over its edges like liquid gold.
As it rushed over the sea, the brightness of the sun sizzled among the waves.
* Where the earth ends (La Esfera de los Libros), by Luis Herrero, goes on sale on Wednesday, January 13.
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