* second enlarged edition

In 1939 José María was imprisoned in the Montjuïc prison. Teresa, his wife, moved from Valencia to Barcelona to be close to him. For eight months they communicated through tiny notes that were slipped between their clothes and food. Decades later, Lucía, her granddaughter, found them inside an envelope that read "Miniature" and her reading kept her up all night.

Divided into three parts, this book begins with the transcription of some of those minimal letters that reflect the uses and customs of a time wrapped in the affection and anguish of a couple that suffers an imposed separation. In the second part, Enrique –son of Teresa and José María, and father of Lucía– evokes childhood anecdotes, details that help us to outline and expand the story and its characters in an almost oral narration, addressed to his daughter. In the third, Lucía's memory is presented to us almost as a catalogue, since she finds the memory that she could not live in objects and documents, which she rescued and compiled over the years, in which the past resonates and which are testimony of what happened, irrefutable evidence of what was told in those notes.

The voice of the father, the voice of the mother is a microhistory of those who lived through the Civil War and what remains of it in their descendants, those of us who are here and now, some of us living in deep and aseptic oblivion, others drowned in a insatiable search for arguments in that forgotten past. And some third parties, a few, who know how to see what happened in words and things and rescue it and show it, without prejudice and without cheating, like authentic archaeologists of memory. Thus, Lucía Boned reminds us that the voices of the past live in the present only when we look for them and look at them closely. They are in everyday life: in a photograph, in a spice rack or in a pair of binoculars; in the voices of our parents when they tell us about our grandparents; also in our bodies that resemble them and in gestures as customary as putting out the coffee in the morning. But they live only in those who want to hear them, who listen to them, take care of them and keep them carefully.

This is the first book by Lucía Boned Guillot (Valencia, 1981), a bookseller for most of her professional life and director of the Terranova publishing house together with Luis Cerveró, its editor and founder, since 2018.

Book (11 x 18.5 cm)
Pages: 80
Language: Spanish
Design: Victoria Studio
Photographs: Alejandra Vera Matos