Biography
Cecilia F. Santomé studied French at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and also completed her doctorate on the Belgian playwright Claire Lejeune there. She has worked as a digital content manager in London, as well as co-founding and editing the online magazine Coolt. She is the author of four works of fiction: I Love You, Me Neither (2019), about two people who meet in London and decide to unite their futures; Small Town Girl (2021), about a woman who emigrates to Barcelona and works as a maid; Farewells (2024), about the gap left by the death of a grandparent; and Boundaries Road (2026), about a woman who rents a room in Balham, south London. This last work received the prestigious Blanco Amor Award for novels.
Synopsis
The Negotiator (152 pages) is a work of fiction, but is based on the longest kidnapping in the history of the Basque separatist group ETA, that of prison officer José Antonio Ortega Lara, who was held in captivity for 532 days between 1996 and 1997. The novel draws on the account of the professional negotiator who took part in meetings with the separatist group in Algiers and is told from four different perspectives. The first perspective is that of the negotiator himself. He is in Algiers, negotiating with the kidnappers, whose demands habitually include the relocation of prisoners and open prison regime.
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Sample
I remember that smell very clearly: a mixture of leather and moss coming from one of the kidnappers, as if the moss had just been uprooted from a still damp earth. The strange thing is that at this stage of the negotiation we were in Algiers.
It was a peculiar odour emanating from that man who endeavoured with conviction to impose some impossible demands while chewing one mint sweet after another; and in the instants of silence, between the buzzing of the blowflies, the smell seemed to grow even stronger. We remained impassive. Coldness was something neither they nor we broke at any moment, as if it was a plate of glass we had in front of us at each of the meetings and did our best not to touch. That was fine by me; it was easier and more practical to speak with clarity. When he attempted to go deeper into his more radical political theories, he did so with a nervous tic, a constant cough. His appearance as a somewhat dishevelled, but calm teacher of philosophy was deceptive.
The hotel waiter, a lively, restless middle-aged Arab, was dying to understand some of our movements. He seemed far too active to me, never leaving our sides, always hanging about like one of those insects. He had aroused my suspicions on the very first day – too great a wish to know in a supposedly foreign language. I think this interest of his was merely personal curiosity, that was his character, though I could never be sure. At the sixth and final meeting – perhaps before, but most of all at that last one – I noticed he displayed a certain fondness for us, which I tried to steer to our advantage. I sensed from the outset that he understood our language, simply because he was constantly trying to hide this – always careful not to lose a single detail, his reactions to some of the kidnappers’ proposals gave him away. We acquired a special complicity, he and I, in those meetings, most of all during the breaks, continual and long. We even ended up with our own signals – the strong, black coffee in greater or lesser quantity, the kind of liquor, be it date or the stronger fig one – he knew about the dissensions among them at the other end of the garden or with their interlocutors, the real leaders. I quickly learnt how to interpret his clues – something natural, nothing we agreed upon. He would be surprised a long time afterwards, sixteen years later, by this communication of ours while drinking mint tea, when I returned to discover a new city, white now and happy, and to relive that other period; by then, he had almost completely forgotten our language.
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Portico of Galician Literature 