Everything We Were (534 pages) is divided into six parts, and is narrated by a range of voices, including a schoolteacher, a detective fiction writer, an orphan girl, a Galician emigrant in Argentina and a historian.

In the first part, a detective fiction writer in London receives a letter from his mother, who has died three months previously, saying she has left some handwritten pages in a trunk in the attic, revealing aspects of her life that he knows nothing about. It is up to him whether he wants to read them. It is the year 1890, and Amaro Carreira leaves his village in Galicia and boards an ocean liner that will take him to Argentina. On board the ship, he meets Gabino, another eighteen-year-old, who introduces him to his family so that he no longer has to eat alone. Gabino and his father, Dionisio, say they are leaving everything behind, they are going to reinvent themselves, learn everything anew. In 1923, Carlota, a girl of fifteen, starts a course of teacher training lasting four years. She is not in agreement with the teacher over the course taken by Spanish history, and thinks it would have been better if the French had won the Peninsular War, since this would have introduced more liberal ideas into Spain and avoided the hundred years of discord that followed the reign of Ferdinand VII. Her teacher is not impressed by her opinion. An orphan girl, Maribel, is adopted and taken to a house where there are strict rules and the parents are of the opinion that people should maintain their social position and do what they are told. The housekeeper, Hilaria, tries to help Maribel, but the parents are not pleased with her and end up returning her to the orphanage. A schoolteacher, Anxo Daponte, is invited by a colleague, Martín Rocha, to his home to meet his family. In the library, he sees they have a lot of foreign books, in English and French, and Martín says it’s not enough just to know your own language to keep abreast of artistic and philosophical ideas. Anxo then goes out with Martín’s friends, they discuss things, but Anxo only dares to give his opinion from time to time, in a quiet voice.

Two fellow students, Regina and Estela, come up to Carlota and say she was right to say what she did. They become friends, and Regina and Estela start visiting Carlota in her ample house, reading her books and sharing her passion for the cinema and theatre. Due to the influence of a Chilean friend, Amaro has ended up taking work as a navvy building the railway to Santa Fe, but he misses Buenos Aires, where he also has a girlfriend, the only problem is he can’t kiss her because she’s only fifteen and also her elder sister has shown an interest in him. The writer has a meeting with his editor, Terry Cox, who is impatient for another novel from the series starring the detective Gilbert Murray, which has been so successful for everybody concerned, but the writer informs him that he has come across some papers of his mother’s, revealing aspects of her life he knew nothing about, and he would prefer to write about this. Maribel works in a bookshop. All the men who come in are of a certain age, and she wonders whether any young, unattached men have any interest in books until one day a medical student called Fernando comes in, asking for a copy of La Regenta, which at that time was on the list of forbidden books. But Maribel has a copy, which she lends him. It is the second year of their teacher training course, and a new girl, Annabelle, has arrived from France. Carlota and Annabelle become good friends. Annabelle’s father is a famous painter in France, and Annabelle invites her to her house, where her father takes photos of Carlota and says he wants to paint her portrait, and where Annabelle’s younger brother, Christophe, thinks Carlota is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

At a birthday lunch for Dionisio, Amaro, who has started work as a milk deliveryman, is offered a job by the owner of a newspaper, Don Baldomero. But the job is not as a journalist, it is as a gardener. He goes to the owner’s house, where he is introduced to the owner’s father, Don Olegario, who ends up wanting him to leave his other jobs and to be his personal assistant, reading to him from the newspaper. Anxo Daponte is eleven and has just left school to go and work on his father’s fishing boat. He endures this for a year, but realizes that this is not the work for him. It is another deckhand, Fontán, who tells Anxo’s father that he is not suited to this life. Carlota and her friends form a club. They go to stay at Annabelle’s house, where they go swimming every day and Annabelle’s father paints her portrait. Two years have passed since Carlota’s first visit to this house, she is now eighteen and Annabelle’s brother, Christophe, is sixteen. He confesses his love for her, and they kiss. Maribel has given up hope of ever being adopted, but a couple come and take her home, where they introduce her to her new sister, Carmen.

In the second part, after the death of Don Olegario, Amaro gets a job in a leather tanning factory, but he’s not content just to do his part of the process, he wants to learn all the different parts and buys some books on chemistry so that he can study them at home. The writer visits Galicia, wondering what to do with the bookshop his mother, Maribel, had owned. His mother has asked that one employee, Elena, be allowed to continue working in the bookshop until she retires, which is in another three years’ time. The writer goes to his mother’s flat and starts to read through some of the papers in her study. Carlota has other suitors, but her interest is centred on Christophe, who has told his parents about their relationship. He says in France there is no need to hide these things. After reading extensively and consulting with his work colleagues, Amaro goes to visit his boss to suggest a different approach, which involves heating the skins to a higher temperature. At first, his boss is astonished at his boldness, but then he agrees that there may be something in what he says. Maribel continues lending Fernando books from her personal collection that are officially forbidden. She would like to see more of Fernando and tries to provoke him with her opinions. Fernando informs her that his father is a cobbler. Maribel is surprised that the son of a cobbler can study medicine at university.

Carlota starts work as a schoolteacher in a village, Cantelle, where most parents have children so that they can help them in the fields and look after them when they are old. She tries to instil in her pupils a love for knowledge and the practical application of that knowledge. She divides the pupils into teams so that they work together; to avoid unhealthy competition, they get extra points for helping pupils from another team. In the village where Anxo Daponte lives, most of the children stop going to school at ten and start to help with fishing or working the land, but Anxo’s mother, Amparo, wants him to continue studying, to go to secondary school in Pontevedra and then to university in Santiago de Compostela. When at the age of ten he continues going to school, he feels the accusatory looks of the neighbours, but prefers to shut himself up at home and devour Plutarch’s Lives. Unfortunately, his mother dies of a heart attack in 1910, and he is taken home from school. Amaro is appointed manager of the leather tanning factory, takes on more responsibility and prepares to marry his girlfriend, Adriana, the younger of the two sisters. The boss of the factory, August Johansson, enjoys sharing conversation with Amaro after work, he talks about his family, the village he comes from in Denmark, how he came to Argentina at seventeen and set up the factory. One day, however, August Johansson doesn’t turn up to work: he has died of a heart attack the previous night. Carlota needs help at home, she doesn’t enjoy the housekeeping in addition to her teaching and her hobbies of painting and reading, so she hires a woman from the village, Filomena, who soon becomes an intimate friend. She confesses to Filomena that she is from a rich family. Filomena is surprised, since the women she has met from rich families were not at all like her.

As a child, the writer preferred to spend his time in his grandparents’ house in Sanxenxo than with his mother. There, he could play with his cousins, Pablo and Rubén, who were younger than him, looked up to him and obeyed all his orders. He envied them their family life with their parents, Carmen (Maribel’s sister) and Román. Fernando comes back to the bookshop, invites Maribel out for a drink, confesses how much he misses her when he is studying in Santiago and asks if she will be his girlfriend. Amaro meets with August Johansson’s widow, Gabriela, and tries to persuade her to sell him the leather tanning factory, otherwise he will leave and set up his own business. She needs time to think about her answer. Filomena tells Carlota how when she was sixteen she went to serve in the house of the doctor in Vilanova. Friends and family would come round, including the doctor’s nephew, Antonio, a law student in Santiago. By the time she was nineteen, he was attracted to her. Filomena became pregnant, as a result of which she was dismissed and became a single mother.

In the third part, Anxo Daponte falls ill on board his father’s fishing boat. He is taken to Pontevedra and diagnosed with measles. He spends several days in the hospital, where first his father keeps him company, then his uncle and aunt from Santiago, who invite him to come and recuperate in their house. Anxo makes it clear that he would like to stay with them and to study, just as his mother had wanted. His uncle goes to talk with his father, who agrees to let him do this. Maribel and Carmen’s grandfather is delighted to have them over to his house, where he likes to play board games with them and to read to them from a book. But the one thing their father won’t allow is for them to play cards. He doesn’t think this is suitable. Seven years have passed, and Amaro has become a very rich man. He bought the leather tanning factory, employed two efficient accountants, who suggested he needed to make contacts in the world of politics if he wanted to expand. What Amaro wanted was his own ranch in the Pampas, and the best way to get this was from the Argentinian army. He became friends with an Argentinian general, who got him a ranch and suggested he supply the army with horse tack. Amaro has become a member of an exclusive club, where an acquaintance attempts to introduce him to the director of a newspaper, Don Baldomero, whom Amaro fails to recognize. Carlota feels that the passion has gone out of her relationship with Christophe and she ends it. At the beginning of her second year in Cantelle, she discovers that Filomena doesn’t know how to read. She teaches her for two hours each day after school, and then decides to extend this teaching to all the adult women in the village who haven’t had a chance to learn to read and write. A lot of women turn up to the meeting to discuss this, but when it comes down to the actual lessons, Filomena is sceptical. She thinks as soon as the women get home to their husbands, sons and housework, they will give up on the idea. In London, the writer is divorced. His ex-wife is going to New York for a month and a half and wants him to look after their daughter during that time. The writer is concerned that this will interrupt the rhythm of his work. He realizes that his poor relationship with his daughter is similar to the poor relationship he himself had with his mother.

Maribel’s father is not very permissive and wouldn’t approve of her relationship with Fernando, so they must keep it a secret. One day, Maribel travels to be with Fernando in Santiago and they kiss. Maribel says she will never love anyone else but him. Amaro is now married to Adriana, Dionisio’s younger daughter. They have two daughters of their own, Sara and Carlota. Amaro has been very successful in business, but he is overcome by a feeling of apathy. Adriana thinks it’s because he achieved success too quickly. To escape this feeling, despite their close relations with Adriana’s family, they decide to move back to Galicia and to settle in Pontevedra. Carlota’s classes for adult women are a real success and she has gone from three to forty pupils. The women are happy to learn new things, even when Eulalia joins the class, a single mother who left her husband because he drank and beat her. Carlota is so happy with the progress that everybody has made she doesn’t notice there may be trouble ahead. Anxo Daponte is invited to a café by a teacher at the school where he works, Castelao, who introduces him to some colleagues, all of whom speak in Galician and defend the idea that Galicia has a history of its own, not just as part of Spain. They encourage him to write about the history of Pontevedra, and Anxo does this, gathering information and filling in the gaps. He publishes a series of Minimal Stories of Pontevedra in a publication called A Nosa Terra, which are well received. Maribel is fifteen and is forced to go out with Carmen and her friends, who are obsessed with a young man who works in the local savings bank, Diego González. Their walks are dictated by where he might be, they follow him around, hoping he may pay them attention. But the one he pays attention to is Maribel, whom he accompanies home on a rainy day. Carmen is annoyed with her for letting him do this.

Filomena and Eulalia inform Carlota that some people in the village are not happy with her for teaching the girls so many things. In particular, the priest comes one day to rebuke her for fomenting discord in the village and for disturbing the status quo with her theories about the evolution of man, dinosaurs and the capacity of women to take decisions. The writer invites his daughter, Sheila, to read the first few chapters of his new novel, in which he describes his complicated relationship with his mother and the kind of strange character she was. This serves to break the ice between them. When she visited Galicia at the age of thirteen, Sheila had managed to establish a warm relationship with her grandmother since they both spoke French and could communicate. She is surprised by what she has read in her father’s novel. Back in Galicia, Amaro buys some land in Pontevedra and opens a theatre, cinema and bookshop. He particularly enjoys selecting the films (only the ones he likes, never with a view to making money); the choice of plays is more limited since there aren’t that many theatre companies passing through Pontevedra. He leaves the bookshop in the hands of a capable manager called Tomás, who will later be Maribel’s colleague. Maribel pays Fernando a surprise visit in Santiago. She discovers that he is distributing clandestine leaflets that protest against Franco’s dictatorship. He also confesses that his studies are being financed not by his father, the cobbler, but by his uncle, who has a grocery store in Santiago, both of whose sons were killed in the Spanish Civil War. Carlota finds out that there is a petition in the village to have her removed from her duties. The school inspector comes to tell her she must follow the official syllabus and omit all references to the equality between men and women and the evolution of man.

In the fourth part, it is 1931, and the first elections of the Second Spanish Republic are being held. There are lots of Galicianist parties, there hasn’t been time to unite them into one party, and Castelao is elected to Parliament. Another Galicianist, Alexandre Bóveda, asks Anxo Daponte to write a simple history of Galicia that can be given to all those present at the founding of the Galicianist Party in December of that year. Maribel likes going to the cinema or a café with her grandfather, but her grandfather insists that she must also go out with her sister Carmen’s friends, even if she doesn’t want to. One time at the cinema, a member of the audience starts singing a Falangist hymn, and her grandfather is ordered to get to his feet and join in. Maribel sees that this has greatly upset him. Three months later, he dies, but this doesn’t prevent Carmen and Maribel from attending the debutante ball. Amaro meets a customer in his bookshop, Fermín Varela, who likes to discuss things in a quiet and learned way. He invites him upstairs so that they can talk more easily, and they end up establishing a regular get-together where they can discuss things with some of Amaro’s friends. Fermín maintains that myths are established to serve the powers-that-be, to prevent free thinking or rebellious ideas. Carlota has left Cantelle and is back in Pontevedra. She goes out with her sister, Sara, who confesses that she has met the man she is going to marry, an actor called Arturo (these must be Maribel’s adoptive parents, so now we see that the friendly and indulgent grandfather figure is the Galician emigrant Amaro Carreira). As a teenager, the writer spends the summer in Sanxenxo at his grandparents’ house. There is a party, and he ends up kissing his cousin, Cristina, Pablo and Rubén’s older sister. Their grandfather, Arturo, is scandalized and makes the writer promise not to do this again. At the end of the summer, the writer returns to Pontevedra, where his mother, Maribel, informs him that she is going to send him to boarding school in Ourense.

The missing link is the historian Anxo Daponte. Anxo meets Carlota at his friend Martín Rocha’s house and is captivated by her. He tries to coincide with her after that, but she always seems to reject his advances. In the end, he decides to open his heart to her and to confess his love. This time, she gives him a positive response, alleging she simply didn’t like all those games of conquest and seduction. Maribel asks Carmen to cover for her so she can visit Fernando in Santiago. They make love, but on her return to Pontevedra Carmen tells Maribel that their parents know where she has been. Carlota confesses to Anxo the reason she left Cantelle after two years. Some of the villagers, and then the school inspector, insisted she not only follow the official syllabus, but also repudiate her ideas about the evolution of man and the equality of men and women. She refused to do this and had to leave. The writer and his daughter, Sheila, travel to Galicia, where they meet Elena from the bookshop. The writer reveals that he isn’t going to sell the bookshop, it is too linked to the history of his family. They discuss Maribel’s difficult relationship with her parents – who would never love her as much as her sister, Carmen – and how she strove to be independent. In front of her father, Maribel absolutely refuses to stop seeing Fernando. When they meet in a café, Fernando says they must be careful because if her father sees that she is defying his authority not only at home, but also in public, the repercussions could be serious.

Amaro is approached by Fermín Varela and two colleagues with the idea of setting up a progressive, independent newspaper called País Moderno. Amaro agrees to finance the project so long as the paper is distributed widely and contributes to improving people’s lives. Since his return to Galicia, he has noticed that almost everyone is resigned to their fate and unwilling to do anything to change it. It is 1934, and Carlota has been teaching in Pontevedra for four years. She is married to Anxo, and they have just had a daughter, Antía. Carlota says she will need help at home, and they hire Filomena. In Pontevedra, Carlota is allowed to speak of the evolution of man, of the equality of men and women, and to introduce the odd change into the syllabus. She thinks that the real battle is being waged by schoolteachers in the countryside, who come up against much stiffer resistance. Every other Saturday, Maribel travels to Santiago to be with Fernando. Fernando is optimistic about the future, but Maribel confesses that she feels a sense of conflict caused by the fact all those around her are not prepared to accept who she is. The writer attends boarding school in Ourense, but feels very detached from the others until one of the teachers, Fr Gilbert, gains his confidence and begins to mould his literary tastes, lending him books such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In the fifth part, in a series of diary entries dated to 1936, Carlota looks forward to a relaxing summer in Sanxenxo in the company of her family, but at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the family takes the decision to return to Pontevedra and await events. In Pontevedra, the family is alarmed, especially Anxo when he finds out that Bóveda has been arrested. He promises to spend more time with his wife and daughter, feeling he has neglected them. The following night, he is arrested. On a visit to Santiago in April, Fernando asks Maribel not to come for two months while he concentrates on his end-of-year exams, but two weeks later she receives a letter from him, ending their relationship. A month after Anxo’s arrest, Amaro is also arrested and taken to San Simón Island near Vigo, where he is kept in the company of another six hundred prisoners. The worst thing is the hunger, which causes arguments and depraved behaviour. Also, some of the stories they hear, such as the seven prisoners who had to face a firing squad, but were told beforehand that one of them – the one who had written what the guards considered to be the most moving farewell letter – would be pardoned and the bullets destined for him fired into the air. After his arrest, Anxo is questioned by an army captain, who wants to know what he was doing in the moments leading up to the military uprising and who else was in the building of the civil governor. He understands that Anxo is a family man and wants to lead a quiet life, but he needs some names. The writer has a meeting with his editor, Terry Cox, to inform him that the biographical novel he is writing will include the lives of several people, not only his mother. His editor is not convinced by the idea of a biographical text that mixes reality with fiction, and would prefer another title starring the detective Gilbert Murray, something his readers expect.

On San Simón Island, a new prison director arrives. He summons Amaro to his office and offers to give him his freedom in return for a sum of money (no less than two million pesetas). A young doctor, who gives Amaro advice, says something similar happened to a businessman from Vigo; he paid the money, was set free, but later a group of soldiers took him at night and killed him. He advises Amaro against the idea, so Amaro rejects the director’s proposal. One night, he is taken off the island with another three prisoners, all of whom are shot. He, however, is returned to the island, where he is again summoned to the director’s office. The director advises him to accept the proposal this time, if he doesn’t want to suffer the same fate as the other three prisoners. After her break-up with Fernando, Maribel discovers she is pregnant. When she tells her family, there is the expected outburst of shouts and anger, but then everyone calms down. Maribel goes out with Carmen and Román one evening only to find that Diego González, the bank worker, is also there. He confesses his love for her, which, he says, nothing will change. Maribel’s mother encourages her to take him at his word and tell him she is pregnant. When she does, Diego doesn’t change his opinion and still wishes to marry her. Fernando’s child will be his own. They are married in June 1959. In prison, Anxo is amazed that only a month earlier, on 28 June 1936, Galicia had celebrated a referendum in favour of autonomy, which more than two thirds of the electorate had voted for. He can’t imagine how things have changed. Bóveda says that perhaps it will be their time in prison that is like a dream later on, or rather a nightmare. Maribel cannot imagine why Diego would fall in love with her instead of any of the other women who would be happy to have him, especially given her condition. She is grateful for his attention. Her parents give the newly weds an apartment in Pontevedra and transfer ownership of the bookshop to Maribel, who is happy with the way things are going, although she cannot help disagreeing vehemently with some of the opinions of her husband and brother-in-law. Amaro accepts the director’s proposal and plays for time, writing to influential businessmen in Pontevedra who he knows will not come up with the money. In the end, he offers him the money he has in his account, which is not enough. Amaro is taken to Pontevedra, where he is court-martialled and faces the death penalty for financing a newspaper with progressive ideas. Meanwhile, the director is himself sentenced to death for extorting money from prisoners in return for their freedom.

In the sixth part, the army captain accuses Anxo of using his position as a teacher to influence his pupils and bring them round to his ideas of separatism. Anxo rejoins that he was only ever in favour of autonomy within a federal Spain. Diego confesses to Maribel that her father, Arturo, came to see him before their marriage to explain the situation to him and to ask him to propose. Maribel feels disconnected from her family and accuses Diego of being more loyal to them than to her. Amaro is sentenced to thirty years in prison. He decides that the only act of resistance he can offer is to survive. He devotes himself to making coffins. This is all he does on the island: eat and work. One day, Sara and Arturo come to tell him they will get him off the island. They also inform him that Carlota and her daughter, Antía, have died in prison. After a year of studying English at Santiago University, the writer informs his mother that what he really wants to do is write and, for this, he is going to ask his grandfather, Arturo, for a job in the family business. The job, however, takes up far too much of his time and also the family members, when they discover his intention to become a writer, make fun of him. So after another year he decides to move to London and start over. Anxo is sentenced to death for his dangerous ideas and for his undue influence over his pupils and placed in front of a firing squad. Amaro is released thanks to Arturo’s contacts, but there is little to occupy him back in Pontevedra. That is until one day he receives a visit from Filomena, who was arrested with Carlota and explains how she died. During their time in prison, Antía fell ill and was taken to hospital in Ourense, where, they said, she was getting better. Before dying, Carlota asked Filomena to go and see Amaro so that he would move heaven and earth to find out what had happened to her child.

Maribel tries to keep her husband away from her family, so that they can have a life of their own. They decide to spend a week by the seaside in Benidorm, but on the return journey by train Diego goes out to buy some cigarettes and is knocked down and killed by a passing train. Amaro is threatened with a substantial fine for financing a newspaper with progressive ideas, which could amount to half his property. Arturo suggests that he transfer all his property (except for the apartment where he lives) to him and Sara. Amaro accepts this on condition that he find out where Antía is. It turns out that, after leaving hospital, Antía was taken to an orphanage and was then adopted. Arturo succeeds in getting the girl returned to the orphanage so that they can adopt her themselves, but she must never know about her true origins. The girl is not called Antía anymore, but Maribel. In the bookshop, Maribel falls off a stepladder and breaks her rib. In hospital, she is treated by Fernando, now a qualified doctor. In the course of their conversation, Fernando reveals that he was caught distributing clandestine leaflets and threatened with being expelled from university, but Arturo came to see him and said, if he wrote a letter ending his relationship with Maribel, he could stop that happening, which he did. Amaro starts writing his memoirs in 1946. He observes the differences between Carmen and Maribel or Antía. He also renews his friendship with the young doctor from the prison on San Simón Island, Miguel Aboi, whom he meets for a drink or a walk. After the death of her grandfather, Maribel receives a visit from Miguel Aboi, who hands her twelve notebooks with her grandfather’s memoirs, and six more containing her mother, Carlota’s diary. He explains that her grandfather wanted her to know the truth about her origins, but not until she was of a sufficient age to take it on board. He then gives her the names of three friends of her father’s, whom she can ask about her father’s life. She gathers lots of information about her father and the history of that time, but dies before she has a chance to write it all down. In the last chapter, the writer meets his daughter in Oxford, where she has gone to study English at Trinity College. He has finished the novel based on his mother’s papers. He claims that what he’s interested in is that the novel meet with success, but he realizes that the characters in this new novel won’t abandon him so easily.

Everything We Were is a magnificent interweaving of the lives of different characters, all from the same family, but belonging to different generations, set against the history of Galicia in the twentieth century. It tells the history of this time through the lives of its protagonists. The writer manages to capture the interest of the reader from the very beginning, and only gradually does it become clear how the characters are interrelated (in particular, the fact that Maribel is her adopted parents’ niece, Carlota’s daughter). Everything We Were stands out as one of the most technically assured Galician novels of the last twenty years and was awarded both the San Clemente and the Gala do Libro literary prizes.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne