ADELAIDA FUERTES english version

ADELAIDA FUERTES

I. Adelaida's Childhood and the Discovery of Reading

Adelaida wanted to be a little missionary nun in the Amazon. It was not a passing whim, but a certainty that burned in her chest ever since, in drawing class, Sister Guerra — a short nun with a round face who had spent fifteen years in a mission lost deep in the jungle — had shown them yellowish photographs from her time as a missionary. Adelaida stared at them with wide eyes, fascinated, as Sister Guerra pointed her finger at the faces of indigenous women with seed necklaces and bare breasts, and at the wide brown river disappearing into the vegetation, where barefoot children bathed next to a canoe. From then on, Adelaida could think of nothing else. So, when she confessed this to her geography teacher at the convent school — a dry woman with round glasses who smelled of camphor — the teacher said nothing. She merely raised an eyebrow, closed the textbook with a sharp thud, and ordered her to go immediately to speak with the headmistress, before the illness spread through the classroom.

The next day, her parents had to go to the school for a meeting with the headmistress. Adelaida's mother, who had already had to deal with her daughter's other follies, entered the office with her jaw clenched; her father, on the other hand, stood by the door, staring at the floor, as if the linoleum were the most interesting place in the world. The headmistress, seated behind a mahogany desk cluttered with crucifixes and letterhead papers, recounted the facts with a slowness that made each syllable more serious. And, after explaining to the parents what had happened, she added, tilting her head slightly:

"That cannot be, because the word of God is reserved for men, and obedience and patience for women."

"Yes, Mother Superior, if anyone knows that, it's me!" replied Adelaida's mother, with a tense smile that did not reach her eyes. "Besides, what could a little girl teach those savage women? It would be ridiculous to think that a child like her could go and tell those women how they should live, or worse, suggest that they imitate their men's lives as if it were a little girls' game."

The father nodded, three times, like a wind-up toy. He added nothing. He never added anything when it came to his daughter's education.

That same afternoon, after returning home and having their snack, her parents punished her by grounding her in her room to teach her a lesson.

Alone in her chamber, Adelaida let herself fall onto her back on the bed, arms outstretched in a cross, staring at the ceiling through the blurry vision of her tear-filled eyes. The ceiling of her room was covered in glow-in-the-dark stars that her mother had stuck on, one by one, when she was little, to keep her company in the dark. Now, those stars seemed to mock her from above: they flickered green and yellow, oblivious to her tragedy, like tiny witnesses to her confinement.

She lay still for a long while, her gaze lost in that blurry, twinkling universe.

When her tears dried and her breathing became more steady, she sat up abruptly, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, and grabbed two dolls that were placed on the wall shelf. She returned to the bed and sat them on her folded legs, as if they were two war advisors. One of the dolls, named Clara, had red tights and blonde hair with highlights; the other, with black hair and faded porcelain eyes, was named Pepona. Adelaida looked them in the eyes, whispered her sorrow to them, and, to her surprise, they both seemed just as bewildered as she was. They also did not understand why she could not be a missionary in the Amazon. She moved them around for a while, changed their clothes, made them dance on the duvet, but soon their company felt empty and absurd.

After a while, she grew tired of the dolls and put them back in their place on the shelf.

It was then, as she raised her arm to place Pepona next to her blonde sister, that she noticed the book her aunt had given her on her last birthday. It was a book, with blue covers and gold drawings, that had remained forgotten, gathering dust, because Adelaida had never liked reading. But that afternoon, with the weight of her punishment on her shoulders, the book seemed to call out to her with a different gleam.

She took the book off the shelf, placed it on the pillow, and, lying on the bed with her chin resting on her hands, she began to read. She turned the first few pages with distrust, moving her lips silently, but when she reached the second chapter, something strange happened: the characters — a gang of teenagers exploring an abandoned house — began to speak inside her head. They were neither echoes nor vague imaginings: she heard their voices with astonishing clarity, with different tones, different pauses, different ways of laughing, each time she ran her finger over the written words. It was as if the paper were a radio receiver and her finger the antenna to another world.

There was no family dinner or goodnight kiss. Only the sound of a key turning in the lock and the silence of an empty hallway.

After that discovery, during the punishments that kept her confined to her room, Adelaida began to read everything that fell into her hands. She devoured adventure novels, biographies of female explorers, poetry books she did not fully understand but that sounded like music to her, and even the leaflets from the medicines her mother left forgotten in the bathroom. She read with a hunger she did not know she had, as if each page were a morsel she had been waiting for years to eat.

That voracity manifested itself, for example, with the four-week grounding her parents imposed on her for having responded with her fists to the boys from the neighbouring town when they had come to ask them to dance at the local festivities. She did not do it out of malice, but because the tallest one, a boy with big ears and brusque manners, had grabbed her wrist too hard and told her that "dancing with him was an honour." Adelaida, who had already read enough books to know that no honour should hurt, landed a blow to his nose that made it bleed all over his white Sunday shirt. During those four weeks, Adelaida read Around the World in Eighty Days propped up on her pillow, King Solomon's Mines lounging on the sheets, Treasure Island on the floor at the foot of her bed, and Oliver Twist held up in the air, pages open in front of her eyes, while she lay on her back.

At school, she stopped wanting to be a little missionary nun in the Amazon. She no longer needed to travel to the jungle to find adventures: she had them all in the pages of the books her aunt kept giving her. And, little by little, she started to write little things: annotations in the margins of her notebooks, then stray sentences in a spiral notebook, then short stories that wavered between reality and fantasy. After some time, she dared to confess in secret that she wrote stories and decided to leave them for Matilde, a quiet, taciturn girl, on the condition that she keep the secret. Matilde, thrilled that someone trusted her and proud to be the custodian of those secret stories, confessed it to another classmate, and the papers began to circulate around the schoolyard like a secret we all wanted to know. The pages, smudged by so many fingers and folded by so many readings, circulated from desk to desk, always on the sly, as if the entire school were a network of accomplices keeping the same secret.

"How vain," we said, and we made fun of her, calling her Adelaida Fuertes.


II. The Administration Course, the Publication, and the Sale of the Book

Essay on Adelaida's Novel.

At the age of twenty-six, Adelaida, like most young women her age, neither studied, nor worked, nor had any expectations on the horizon. To do something with her life, she decided to go back to school and enrolled in a basic vocational training course in administration. There, we ran into some friends from the old convent school. Happy to have found each other again, we continued making fun of Adelaida Fuertes, as always.

We led a normal life: from school to home and from home to school, and some of us got more tens in absences than others. Then, when there were only a few months left to finish the course, Adelaida showed up at the institute with a box full of identical books.

We thought she wanted to be a bookseller or a librarian, but the mistake was soon revealed. The reality was quite different: while we were deceiving ourselves about our age, complaining at home that we didn't like fish or thick noodle soup, and not knowing how to fry an egg, our classmate, in order to act important and make an impression, had secretly written a book. When she finished it, she sent copies to the addresses of the publishers of the books she read — some of which had not existed for quite some time — and finally received a reply from a printing press in Albacete telling her that they would take care of the Galician proofreading and the printing of her first novel. All for one thousand euros.

Without hesitation, she transferred the amount to the account they indicated and sent them a copy of the bank receipt along with the complete manuscript.

We did not know the origin of the funds. Someone said she spent the money an aunt had left her when she died so that she could live a normal life, go to university, and get married.

Now Adelaida was at IES La Esperanza del Polígono with the box of books she had gone to pick up at the post office, and she was asking us to buy one from her, without us really knowing why.

The first one to buy a book was the philosophy teacher. Being very absent-minded, she thought the proceeds from the sale were for a class field trip. The philosophy teacher showed the book to the school counsellor, who could not believe that a student from the school had written a book, and since the philosophy teacher mistakenly told her the purchase was for a field trip, the counsellor also bought the book.

In the school cafeteria, the principal noticed that the two teachers were each carrying a copy of the same book, so he went over to ask them what they were reading. When they revealed that the author was Adelaida Fuertes, a student he himself taught, he decided that a work written by a student from the school could not be missing from the school library. Immediately, he instructed the janitor to buy several copies for the school.

The janitor went looking for Adelaida and, seeing that the book was already circulating among the teaching staff, did not want to be left out and bought a copy for himself. Moreover, the novel with a personal dedication cost ten euros: a real bargain, according to the janitor.

By the end of the morning at the institute, some had bought the book because of the stir caused by a student's novel, and others just to not be outdone. Adelaida, not missing a trick, convinced the vendor at the newsstand across the street to keep the rest of the box and sell them on commission. "After all," the vendor told her, "everyone has a pile of unread books at home, and one more doesn't matter." The fact is that when Adelaida returned home empty-handed, her mother asked her if she had gone to see the notice the postman had left for her the day before. "It was nothing important," she replied with a shrug.

But that day, Adelaida surprised her parents by making dinner herself, and the whole family ate a great big pan-fry of chips with eggs and ketchup.

Adelaida never at any point made a donation for a school field trip.

And now, with the book already in the hands of half the institute and the newsstand across the street, it is time to talk about what really matters: its content.


III. The Essay on Adelaida Fuertes's Novel (Plot, Characters, Chorizos, Miou, Fiasta, and the Postman)

The first reading of the novel came from Matilde, to whom Adelaida had secretly left her first writings at school on the condition that she keep the secret, and she had passed them on to other classmates until the secret manuscripts began to circulate in a network of accomplices sharing the same secret. Matilde read the novel so she could share her reading in secret with her friends.

The book was full of mistakes. To the reader's bewilderment, it used words like fiasta or miou in its dialogues, because it had been translated into Galician by an American artificial intelligence proofreader who, in its search for information, consulted some Galician philology pages from the University of Adelaida (Australia), a website from Tomiño (Pontevedra) by the nationalist professor J. J. Gutiérrez Martínez, a video of a Galician YouTuber shouting, and a forum for fans of a television series about a Galician drug trafficker.

Despite how unusual the phrases with which the characters expressed themselves in the novel might seem:

—¡Acércate, miou, que hoy voy a hacer una fiasta! —

(Come here, miou, today I'm going to have a fiasta! —)

these quaint expressions soon became famous at all the fiastas. And not only at parties: they also crept into the readers' daily lives, as in this dialogue — which is also included in the novel, and I don't know if we owe it to Adelaida's genius or to the aforementioned AI:

—¡Miou, miou ao cole hoxe, que está choviando e fai moito fríou! —

—Kid, we're going to school today, it's raining and it's very cold! —

Let's leave aside how the characters in the novel speak and get to what really matters: its content.

The writing of the novel has a complex structure that we are going to analyse.

When she had the idea to write her novel, Adelaida used paper notes stuck to the walls, as seen in police movies where the detective hangs up his characters, facts, and events on the wall of his office, and united by red wool thread, she used them as a guide to knit the plot of the novel with an old typewriter.

At some point in this plot, the parents decided to paint Adelaida's room, which had not been touched since her earliest childhood. They, seeing those yellow papers, thought that their daughter had stuck them on to simulate that the wall had the same colour as when they had placed her there in a crib.

The arrival of the painters forced Adelaida to make an unexpected halt in the novel. She had to peel the yellow notes off the wall and store them in a shoebox while the room was being painted. It took almost two weeks, since they had come as a favour and were friends of the father's brother-in-law.

When the brush was done and the smell of fresh paint still lingered, Adelaida returned with the shoebox and stuck the yellow papers back up on the walls. But, being second-time-around — like relationships — they did not stick up in the same order as the first time, and the main ideas of the work became jumbled.

This caused unexpected twists that forced the reader to reflect. Reflections that occur as one progresses through the reading:

"But the story started a different way!"

Frequently, the reader has to stop to make sense of what has been read — Did I read it wrong? — and on other occasions it seems as if several WhatsApp conversations are being followed at once.

The mystery in the novel begins in the first pages of the book:

The victim had not died: they had killed him by sending him, by express parcel, a box of chorizos filled with rat poison.

Upon arriving at the corpse's house, the police ask the neighbours if they could have witnessed anything. They all declared the same thing: around the time the victim died, they were watching TV with their phones in their hands.

"I didn't notice anything because I was watching TV and chatting with a friend, asking her if she knew what had just happened in the movie," read the note in one of the detectives' notebooks.

The first moments of mystery in the novel arise:

Who was on the other end of the phone?

But in the second chapter of the novel, due to a lack of experience in the detective novel genre, the mystery disappears when they are at the funeral home, just before moving the victim to his final rest, with the scene where friends and family gather for the last goodbye and the killer confesses her crime to the readers, being the only one whose eye makeup is not smudged from tears.

After several attempts at reading the novel, the motive for the crime is discovered.

The killer, who in the novel has the same name as the author, was presumably meant to resemble Adelaida. Her colleagues at work, in the fiction, give her a bottle of perfume, coincidentally on the same day her boss has a lemon air freshener placed on her door just for her.

The victim, Alex, a young man with important prospects for getting ahead in life, had just been signed by the local football team with the promise of receiving a bonus of five euros per goal scored; and after a relationship of several months with the killer, they had just broken up because of a fight she had with two of his best friends, leaving one of them knocked out.

Adelaida not only presents the victim well in his adult life, but had already done so years earlier, in a classroom scene that some of the high school girls highlight as one of the most successful moments. The scene is this:

It was nine in the morning when Professor Méndez, the school principal, as he did every term, wrote the five exam questions on the blackboard in his square, threatening handwriting. The maths class fell silent. Not even the smartest students dared to breathe too loudly. Professor Méndez was a hard nut, the kind who seemed to have swallowed a ruler and been born correcting his own birth. He turned around, adjusted his glasses, and gave his usual speech: two hours, no books, no notes... and anyone caught cheating could say goodbye to passing his subject. Then, with a curt "You may begin," he started the exam.

Twenty minutes passed. Professor Méndez paced between the desks like a cat trying to catch a mouse, observing every movement, every furrowed brow, every bead of sweat. It was then that he noticed Álex, the boy at the last desk in the row, in the middle of the class; he had his sheet completely blank. The professor planted himself in front of him and, with that deep voice that seemed to drill into the ears, asked him why he wasn't doing the exam.

Álex looked up with the face of someone caught at the scene of the crime and, with a sincerity so absurd it seemed invented, replied that he hadn't brought a pen.

Professor Méndez was frozen for a few seconds. Then he turned to the rest of the class and, raising his voice with that sarcasm of his that his students so feared, exclaimed:

"Hey, hey! He comes without a pen to the exam! You have to see it, you have to see it..."

The class laughed, but fell silent again as soon as the professor shot them a look. Turning back to Álex, he asked him how it was possible that he hadn't brought a pen to an exam.

Álex, shrugging, confessed the truth:

"It's because my father took it away from me, professor."

Professor Méndez looked at him as if he had just heard the greatest stupidity of his career.

" 'My father took it away from me' ... you have to hear everything. Are you telling me that your father took the pen from you to come to the exam?" he repeated in disbelief, as if savouring the absurdity of the situation.

"And why did your father take the pen from you?"

"Because it was his."

Professor Méndez fell silent, staring at him with incredulous eyes. Then he shook his head and, with a sigh, went to his desk, where he sat down and stared blankly at the ceiling of the classroom.

When the bell rang and the students started filing out into the hallway, Pepona the class rep, who sat two rows ahead and hadn't missed a detail of the scene, caught up with Álex at the door. She gave him a friendly nudge and said:

"Hey, Álex, you did really well in the exam today."

Álex was surprised.

"Me? I just made a pathetic spectacle with the pen thing," he replied, blushing slightly.

But Pepona shook her head and explained:

"No, no. You told him exactly what you had to say. Right to his face. You were sincere and you totally disarmed him. Did you see how he sat down at the end, for the whole exam, and let everyone copy? That has never happened before."

"Yeah, the one time I could have passed maths, I had nothing to write with."

This Álex, the pen boy, is the same one who, years later, will appear as the victim of the poisoned chorizos. Those who have read the novel carefully know that that absurd sincerity that disarmed Professor Méndez is the same one that, later on, would lead him to trust the wrong person.

When they separated, the victim recklessly posted online how badly the killer spoke about her friends.

In this, we agree with Adelaida:

You don't have to be very perceptive to understand the feelings that lead to the outcome.

The killer finds out through her best friend one afternoon in the park.

The sun was shining, and its rays bounced off the aluminium of the metal tables on the bar terrace, while she waited, drinking a horchata.

When her friend arrives, they greet each other, and she sits down in front of her and orders another horchata. They begin to talk, and at some point in the conversation, the friend, who was attentively listening to the chirping of the birds in the surrounding trees, stops sipping her horchata and says:

"I would have preferred another friend too, but you were the one who was always there with me."

Upon hearing what her friend had just said, the killer — who until that moment was unaware of the publication of her opinions on a social networking site — discovers that her ex has posted her confidences online. And without answering her, sipping her horchata quite naturally, she silently swears to take revenge on him.

At this point, the reading becomes easy and fluid, and one can skip several chapters — the most advisable thing to do to avoid getting lost again — until reaching the denouement, when the postman discovers the killer injecting poison into a bag of chorizos.

"Who are those chorizos for?"

"They're for my ex's dog!"

"But your ex doesn't have a dog!" said the postman, bewildered.

Or something like that, because Adelaida's dialogues sometimes get blurry.


IV. Friends' Email (in which they talk about the title, the Caramalo cousins, and revenge)

After publishing the essay about my friend Adelaida Fuertes's novel on my blog, I received numerous emails asking for the title of the work. To avoid bad faces and arguments that might cloud the necessary tranquillity — and forgetting — I am forced to remain silent. Girlfriend stuff.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, truly. But, although Adelaida may think otherwise and blame her poor sales at the newsstand on my warnings about the risks of reading it... that's another story altogether. I believe the essay, published on my blog, has unintentionally managed to take that work out of the narrow circle of intimate friends and mere chance.

But not everything was questions about the title.

To my surprise, some readers of the blog have gone beyond asking for the title of the novel. They swear that the fight described in its pages really happened. They hint that Adelaida recalls that afternoon when she thrashed her cousins, the Caramalos, because in a local football match they wouldn't let her ex-boyfriend score a goal against them.

It's not that I was there, mind you, but the town is a handkerchief and news flies faster than flies in summer. It turns out that Sunday, the municipal football pitch was fuller than usual. The Caramalos — three brothers with big ears and a bad temper — played for the home team. Adelaida's ex-boyfriend, a skinny boy from a good family whom they called "El Pato" (The Duck) because of his running style, had signed for the visiting team. Everything was going well until El Pato charged towards the goal with a ball that came to him on a platter. The Caramalos, who couldn't stand seeing an outsider show off, blocked his path with unnecessary violence. The eldest elbowed him in the ribs; the middle one stepped on his foot on purpose; and the youngest, who was the nastiest, spat on his shirt while telling him that "goals were for real men." El Pato, better at words than deeds, shrank back and looked at the ground, the ball lost and his honour shattered. Adelaida, watching from the stands with her arms crossed and her jaw clenched, said nothing. She stood up, went down to the changing rooms, waited for the match to end, and when the Caramalos came out as if nothing had happened, she confronted them one by one. There were no shouts or threats: just a well-aimed punch to the eldest's nose, a kick to the middle one's shin, and a shove that sent the youngest crashing against the field's fence. They say that while the three groaned on the ground, Adelaida simply adjusted her headband and said: "Goals are for real men, but so are punches." I'll add nothing more.

Others ask about the content of the messages the neighbours exchanged while the victim, in the kitchen, peeled potatoes to go with the poisoned chorizos. My hypothesis is that the killer sent fake news to the group to keep them entertained while the victim agonised.

I know for a fact that that day, the neighbours' group chat was more active than ever. The killer — who in the novel appears as a middle-aged woman with a plastic smile and a firm hand with spices — creates the perfect hoax. First, she writes that she has seen the police lurking around the victim's street, and that they are surely coming to arrest someone over an inheritance matter. That makes all the neighbours lean out of their windows, forgetting about their phones. Ten minutes later, the killer adds that the victim's son has had a traffic accident and is in hospital. That keeps the neighbours busy calling the emergency room and consoling each other in the group. Meanwhile, the victim peels potatoes in the kitchen, alone, unaware of everything, with the chorizos simmering in the pan and the poison already dissolved in the oil. When the neighbour from the fifth floor finally remembers to call the victim to ask about her son, it is too late: the victim has tried the chorizos and is on the floor, the potato still in his hand. The killer, from her kitchen, reads the help message and smiles. She has bought enough time. Almost twenty minutes of empty chatter and fake news. Enough for the poison to do its work.

Will there be a second part? No one knows what goes on in Adelaida's head, and even less so now that she has written her first novel. But she herself warns, before any unsuspecting reader begins, that this is the first edition of her work. And Adelaida may have many defects, including being fanciful, but not that of being a liar. So, sooner or later, we will have a sequel.

Because the main victim of her novel cannot be left without revenge, nor can the readers who have read the book remain unmoved.

mvf.
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