Of Angels and the Dead (174 pages) follows the lives of some university students in Santiago de Compostela during the 1970s. It was regarded as a groundbreaking novel when it was first published in 1977, shortly after the end of Franco’s dictatorship, for the way it used different narrative techniques. It opened up new possibilities for the Galician novel.

         Four students occupy a bar in Santiago, the Galicia. They are bored and wonder what to do, waiting for the others to make a suggestion. One of them, Xoán, thinks about his mother, who doesn’t understand his lifestyle, his desire to wear old clothes, to smoke. He finds very little difference between her brain and the brain of an idiot. A report on the television reignites their conversation. A young English woman is being interviewed about holidays in Spain and bull-fighting. They comment on her appearance. Xoán has barely slept in two days and has a headache. He goes to the toilet. On his return, he watches a little of the film on television, listens to the conversation of two girls next to him and wonders how long it has been since he masturbated. He feels tired. He remembers his mother, father, grandfather. He needs money and should go home, but he doesn’t feel he belongs there. Guillerme again suggests they make a move.

         Two school friends are swimming in Pontevedra estuary, next to the island of Tambo. Luísa is naked because she has forgotten her swimming costume. Encarna regrets they don’t see each other so much now that they are studying in Santiago. She tells Luísa about her boyfriend, Manolo, and how much she loves him, how much trust there is between them. The sea is full of corpses, some floating upwards, others face downwards, their bodies split by roots, giving off a terrible stench.

         Luísa and Xoán are at a disco. Luísa tells Xoán how she found herself in a port, the fishermen unloading the fish, and she was suddenly alone. Encarna and Manolo had left her. While she was relieved not to have to put up any more with their artificial happiness, she was also scared to be on her own. In the end, the fish auction finishes and Luísa finds her friends. She doesn’t feel well and asks Xoán to accompany her home. She is in a forest, Encarna waiting on the beach, she is searching for firewood in the company of Manolo, who can’t take his eyes off her, and she is naked, although Encarna has said she doesn’t mind if Manolo sees her naked, she isn’t jealous.

         Xoán walks around Santiago, a city where it is impossible to get lost, reflecting on his love affair with Luísa, which had started so passionately, the two of them feeling alive, exploring each other’s body, but had progressed towards silences and lies, the two of them living on the threshold of hell. When she is not there, Xoán finds the city horrendous, figures in stone embracing nothing, but suddenly he comes across her under the rain. It is market-day in Santiago. Dark, despairing figures arrive from abandoned mountain villages. Xoán and Luísa question the meaning of life; if happiness is in the future and can only be reached at the end, all that is left in the meantime is darkness. A friend of theirs, Atanís, is writing a novel about the right to be oneself and to be happy. He is on page 37 and hasn’t come up with a title yet. While Atanís continues to talk, a cow in the market urinates on the ground. Luísa’s mother is unhappy in her marriage. If she doesn’t leave her husband, it is because she doesn’t want to upset Luísa, although Luísa doesn’t care. She wishes she had married somebody else. She considers being unfaithful. Atanís carries on discussing his novel.

         Luísa and Manolo make love together on the island of Tambo, in a deserted hermitage. On the way back to the beach, where Encarna is waiting, Manolo reproaches her for being a bad friend to Encarna and for claiming that everything is just ceremony. He prefers ceremony (their artificial happiness) to nothing at all. Luísa prefers nothing. This is the end of part one of the novel.

         In part two, Luísa’s mother orders a coffee in a bar. Her husband, Ramón, has gone to Barcelona for several days. Since their last argument, they have been sleeping separately. She cannot stand staying at home. She feels like the woman in ancient Greece who was buried alive for giving a burial to her brother. She remembers how, when she was young, she liked Vicente, but they had an argument, and how Ramón, who was the son of neighbours, peasant farmers who had grown rich from selling wolfram, had come to her house. And she remembers how pretty Luísa was as a child, although a local nun said she was ‘a little maladjusted’, and how Luísa had attempted to commit suicide by slitting her wrists in the bath. Ramón had insulted her, said he never wanted to see her again, she was old and hysterical. But Ramón was the one who was old, who had a belly. And then, while out driving one night, she had come across Vicente. He had never married. They stopped and he invited her into his house, but she said she couldn’t, she was married and had a daughter. Vicente confessed he had never stopped loving her and was waiting for her still.

         In Luísa’s room, Xoán finds it impossible to tell her he thinks they should separate, they are destroying each other. In the end, he suggests going out. The two of them travel to the seaside for a change of scenery, to see if this will help their relationship. Atanís doesn’t think they should go. At the beach, they swim naked, forget about the university and university exams. Xoán wants Luísa to have something to live for, something that will make her happy, but he is afraid. When they go out, they find the village empty. Xoán tries to go close to her, but Luísa bites him on the cheek and insults him. Xoán makes as if to slap her, but she runs away. Back in the house where they are staying, Xoán stays in the basement while Luísa moves about upstairs. Xoán is still afraid, afraid of the villagers who chased away a couple from Madrid who had come to stay. He is afraid the villagers will do the same to them, despite the fact this is his grandfather’s house. If he was on his own, he could go out, but not with a woman, not with their appearance. He is jealous of Atanís, who made love with Luísa for four hours on a beach. Perhaps a man and a woman are only able to be happy for a few hours, not for fifteen days, only while they are still an enigma to each other. Luísa is trying to construct a place where they can be happy, safe from death, but Xoán is unable to play along.

         Atanís and Luísa meet in Lanzada. Atanís is attracted to Luísa, but also afraid of suffering. Love needs more than despair and suffering to survive. He heads towards the beach, past the tourists who, at five in the afternoon, are drinking soft drinks and eating ice creams. He observes the different people on the beach – children playing with the sand, young men doing cartwheels, young women conscious of their breasts, families enjoying a day out – and everything seems to him beautiful. Then he meets Luísa again. She is in a swimming costume, sitting on a towel. They discuss her plans to go to university and study philosophy. Atanís has been there for four years and doesn’t think it’s worth the effort, he is sick of university. The other people begin to leave the beach. Atanís is attracted to every part of Luísa’s body and feels a warm wave rising inside him. He kisses her and, for a moment, the two of them manage to escape the necropolis of dreams, the clutches of death, the hallucinations of reality. Luísa runs along the beach and waits for him by the rocks. Atanís realizes she is a virgin and makes her promise their affair will last for only a few hours. She opens herself to him on the beach. As Atanís remembers these things, he wishes she could return to him. This is what makes him write.

         In the house in the village, Luísa pretends to be different people – Xoán’s mother, Xoán’s daughter, her friend Encarna, a prostitute, Queen Kuba of Madagascar, Sleeping Beauty – and Xoán is obliged to play different roles as well, but he finds it difficult. They are waiting for the local festivities, which Xoán remembers as a child, with joyful singing and fireworks. The idea is to pretend they have arrived that day, in the meantime not to be seen, but there is a knock at the door of the house at three in the morning, someone has seen them. Xoán is afraid, Luísa laughs at him. Xoán imagines the whole village is outside, Luísa can’t hear anything. Xoán doesn’t want them to be discovered until the day of the festivities, the villagers may not like them, may not take kindly to two señoritos from the city coming to the village on a kind of honeymoon. Luísa challenges Xoán to go downstairs to have a look. When he returns, he says there was nobody there, it was the wind. Luísa suggests it may have been ghosts.

         In the next scene, Luísa’s mother imagines getting up in the night, putting on her sexiest underwear and driving to Vicente’s house, ringing the doorbell, surprising Vicente, who showers her with kisses. Meanwhile, in a disco, Xoán’s friends discuss the position of Galician emigrants in Germany, how they never spend any money, save everything they earn, live according to their own morals, rarely go out. Pose is annoyed they have come to a disco for bourgeois people. He is annoyed at the waiters for picking on anyone who looks different and leaving the others alone. Nogueira tells the story of an unqualified factory worker from Spain who went to a disco in Germany and got kicked out for not speaking their language. Meanwhile, Luísa’s mother examines herself in front of the mirror, finds herself attractive enough, puts on her make-up, decides that today is the day, there is nothing left for her, only the cold presence of her husband or the cruel words of her daughter. In the disco, the friends watch the bourgeois people dancing and find them all frigid. In the house, Luísa’s mother decides she won’t be able to do what she wants today either and scratches her breasts until drawing blood. In the disco, Pose is in a world of his own. In the house, Luísa’s mother waits in front of the lift. She goes down to the garage, but, instead of getting in the car to visit Vicente, she imagines a different reaction, Vicente standing in the doorway of his apartment, looking cold and indifferent. She knows she is not going to be able to go through with her plan and abandons the garage. In the disco, Pose breaks his glass and the waiter kicks them out. In the village, Xoán and Luísa struggle with each other in front of the house, lying in the mud. Xoán does his best to create a bridge between his conscience and the world Luísa inhabits. He wants to fuse with her, to break down the barriers that separate them once and for all.

         In this short, intense novel, the author presents the frustrations and aspirations of different generations and classes, a group of students in Santiago and their parents, people who live in the city and the village, people who live in Galicia and who emigrate to find a better life. The novel depicts Santiago in the early 1970s, towards the end of Franco’s dictatorship, when there was darkness and despair, but also a strong desire for hope. It is a world in which young people seek to confront the truth, not to make do with clichés, but ultimately fail to be at peace with themselves.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne