Los asquerosos (The Loathsome)A novel by Santiago LorenzoBlackie Books, Barcelona, 2018 - 220 ppLanguage: SpanishRights Sold: French (Seuil), Italian (Blackie), German (Heyne Hardcore), Portuguese, excl Brazil (Gradiva), Chinese complex (ACME Publishing).
The novel is about Manuel, a young man in his early 20s who lives (or survives) in Madrid during the worst years of the crisis. He has recently left his parents’ home and rents a microscopic space, without even an actual contract. He gets very bad, and poorly paid, temporal jobs and is worried about his lack of success in making friends. In fact he has none, except an uncle of him who is in his late forties and also a lonely man. But Manuel has always been very good at doing things with his hands and always carries a screw driver with him.
After an unexpected incident in which he harms a police officer in the neck with the screw driver (he believes he has killed the policeman and fears he will end up in jail), he runs to his uncle’s home and they decide he will take his car and quickly escape from the city. He needs to disappear completely. After hours driving he finds an abandoned little village in the middle of nowhere. It’s a very rural area, and it looks like the village has been abandoned for decades. He picks up one of the houses and takes shelter there. The house has no electricity, no water, nothing...At the village, he only receives help from his uncle in Madrid (who is the narrator of the book).
They are in touch only via an old (non-smart) phone and they devise a plan so that he receives food from a supermarket once a month. The uncle is also very short of money and they will have to ration Manuel's (very) little savings. The deliverer is instructed to leave the bags in front of the house and leave, they tell the supermarket that someone will pick up the bags later.
While Manuel is learning to live by his own and adapt to his new circumstances, he reads paperback books that were left in the house. He starts to enjoy this life of isolation, being without documents, no job, no bosses and just paying attention to he passing of time. He knows nothing about nature and can’t distinguish a pine from an oak tree.
At this point, the novel might bring memories of Thoreau or of Robinson Crusoe but what makes the novel exceptional is the brilliant prose of the author and the irony that the guy lands in the middle of nature not because of his choice (he is not a modern lover of rural life) but because of the accident with the police. Despite this forced isolation, little by little he starts enjoying being on his own, with no human contact at all. He does things, recollects wood, repairs stuff, takes long walks and ultimately realizes that he never really wanted to make friends, that he shouldn’t have fought his life-long instincts of being alone because now, for the first time, he starts feeling well with himself. He starts to eat plants he has at hand. He discovers a plum tree, a vine that gives him grapes… And the months pass by happily. He has stopped to need things and doesn’t even think about being hunted by the police. Manuel discovers his true self, and in the process he also discovers that he needs almost nothing of what enslaves the rest of us, caught between frustration, hypnosis and fraud.
But one day a woman arrives and rents the adjacent house. She will use it as a weekend house for her family. Fortunately, she doesn’t see him. This breaks all the fragile balance and harmony but, so far, he only needs to hide from the newcomers during weekends. However, as weeks pass by he starts feeling very upset by the presence of these people, even if only for a couple of days. They don’t understand anything about being in the nature, they are noisy and walk around with their phones, their city clothes… they become The Nasties. And, ironically, the nasties here become ourselves. Readers realize how, probably, they would act exactly as the newcomers do. People who instead of looking at the sky to see if it’s cloudy will look at their phones to check the weather. People who will install a little gym at home to keep fit, instead of doing physical activities in the woods. People who will do whatever to prevent nature entering into their country home…
Manuel devises a plan to get rid of them and, in a few very funny scenes, breaks into the house during the week and sabotages many of the house’s comodities in a somehow childish hope that they will not come again. The novel, here, gets very intriguing (almost thriller like as we fear Manuel will be found out).
And the inevitable happens and for some reason, the nasties come back to the village during the week, on the wrong day, and Manuel does not realize they are there. They hear noise in Manuel’s house (he’s chopping wood) and are curious about it. They open one door and find him here, so completely unprepared that he chops his own leg with the axe. He can’t run away, he has been caught.
Manuel’s idyllic life abruptly comes to an end and he is taken to hospital, where he is sure that sooner or later police will break into his room and arrest him… but to our surprise none of this happens. After some days he feels confident and pays a visit to Madrid. He goes into a bank, into a government office, identifies himself but nothing happens either… It looks like no one cares about his identity.
After some research, the uncle finds out that the cop wasn´t killed at the incident with the screw driver, but that he was killed some time afterwards by another cop and that the police stopped looking for the guy who had harmed him with the screw driver as they never had any clues to follow. Ironically, Manuel was never looked for by the police. He might have stayed in Madrid, he didn’t need to escape in a hurry. But in the meantime the house of the nasties has been burned to the grounds because of one of his sabotages, and as he was away from the village no one suspects him. The nasties see it as a tragedy caused by themselves (they might have forgotten to switch off a boiler) and decide to abandon the house forever…
After this unexpected twist, Manuel realizes he can go back to the village and that he will be there alone again… He can go back to his life away from the mainstream, away from the need of buying and possessing things. In fact he has no desire at all to go back to his life before the incident with the police officer.
