I like islands, or the idea of them, and diaries, so about a month ago, when I found out about the existence of a certain book, I went crazy looking for it until I found it, because it mixed both concepts. ‘Deception Island’, it is titled, and it was edited by Pre-Textos more than a decade ago. Beautiful title and inhospitable place. Deception Island is just a sliver of lava whipped by the waves, between the South Shetland archipelago and the Antarctic Peninsula, an island that is not such, but an icy horseshoe-shaped ring. Hence, I suppose the name given by the discoverer. You expect to drop anchor on dry land and find yourself with a bitten donut, ‘c’est la vie’.
The author, Rafael Fombellida, has a melancholic look and at the same time skeptical, with a bite of chili pepper, of piparra from the north; the look of estrangement I started ‘Deception Island’ skipping paragraphs here and there, a way of reading that is quite in keeping with the nature of a book where aphorisms, diary entries, short stories, brief notes from nature in which the landscape of Cantabria appears from time to time. Fombellida was born in Torrelavega.
JEDED FACES
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In the reader’s pecking, a fragment appears that talk about sentimental trains, those that silently matured from coal to electricity crossing cornfields that ended up gobbled up the conurbations. A previously rural landscape dotted with halts with modest names where normal people get on and off, to their things. Nurses, excited boyfriends, a Caminos student, retirees, the one who is going to get his driver’s license, the workers of the Solvay chemical, “jaded, brutish faces, riddled with yawns, slumped over with sleep.”
Stumbling over the paragraph I can’t help but remember of the fiasco of the commuter trains in Cantabria and Asturias, the old FEVE, the narrow-gauge railways, a monumental botch job for which the president of Renfe and the Secretary of State for Transport have resigned this week. A scandal baptized as ‘Fevemocho’ or ‘Gálibogate’. It turns out that Renfe commissions in 2020 the manufacture of 31 convoys for the north that do not enter the tunnels, the manufacturer warns, advises and the file remains gathering dust on an office table until the rich honey cake is uncovered. In short, there will be no new trains until 2026. Things happen so fast that you can’t get to sharpen them. And one stays thinking about the people at the halts, every day the same route, the gestures of routine and fatigue, each one in their troubles, worried, in a letting go in the sway, writes Fombellida, the vision lost «in the fog, in backyards on the outskirts». Passengers from Deception Island.