The Fire (200 pages) is Sara Vila Alonso’s second novel in the Galician language and received the Blanco Amor Award. It was first published by Edicións Xerais de Galicia in 2024. The novel is divided into two parts (thirty-seven chapters) detailing the events leading up to the fire, and a shorter section detailing the fire itself.

In the first part, the narrator finds it difficult to go back to her grandmother’s village, Neboeiro. It is “an ugly, dead place”. Her grandmother’s house is empty and the shed has been burnt. When her parents insist on taking her there, she collapses to the floor. She remembers playing on her grandmother’s swing, the dizziness it caused her. She has always suffered from anxiety – as when she wet herself at school or had to go up to the chalkboard and do maths in front of the class. But her anxiety got worse as a result of the fire. She remembers when a dog came to live in the shed, Perdida. She identifies with the dog. She has hair on her body and tries to dye it blond, so it isn’t so visible, but only ends up inflaming her skin, to her mother and grandmother’s amusement.

The narrator takes solace in the wind blowing through the eucalyptus trees, but sometimes this isn’t enough and she loses her temper, especially when a classmate, Brais, makes fun of her. One day when he is about to kick the dog Perdida, the narrator pushes him to the ground and runs off with Perdida. They go down to the railway line. This is one of the dangerous places in the village, together with the river. She would like to have an older sister, as her friend at school, Sandra, does, but any attempt by her parents to have another child ends in a miscarriage. The narrator used to enjoy going to the river with her grandmother. Her grandmother had been a smuggler and was a good swimmer. But then they turned the river beach into a slab of concrete and put the creek inside a pipe, to harness the river for electricity, and they no longer went swimming.

When she tried to depilate her legs, the pain was so excruciating she couldn’t continue. So, she shaves them instead. One day, they go to get an ice cream and on the way they pass Brais’s house, which is like Versailles or Falcon Rest. Everything is immaculate. The problem is that Perdida falls into their swimming pool and makes it dirty. The narrator feels ashamed. Perdida goes with them everywhere. She even accompanies the narrator’s grandmother when she is going to receive communion at church. And to the cemetery, where she gets into trouble for defecating on someone’s tomb. She also gets fleas. September is the narrator’s least favourite month. It is also the month when her grandfather died. Her grandmother misses him, but also has to admit he was difficult to live with and liked to spend money in the tavern. The narrator fancies Brais’s cousin, Carlos, but doesn’t dare talk to him.

Perdida is on heat. They keep her in the shed. But when they visit a neighbour to collect a bag of home-grown tomatoes, Perdida gets out and mates with one of the local dogs. At the same time, the narrator gets her first period – which is what her grandmother and the neighbour, Nucha, had been talking about when they talked about “the American uncle” and whether he had come yet. The narrator visits the neighbour so she can apply wax to her moustache and take it off before she starts secondary school. Everything goes well. She even makes a new friend, Marta, who doesn’t care about her body hair. But in the second week Brais insults her in front of her new friend, and she retaliates by pushing him to the ground. This gets her into trouble and she has to take a note home from the headmistress.

The narrator and her mother attend a meeting with the headmistress, who is not happy with the narrator – she stutters, she has no friends, she talks like an old woman and lacks the registers of her people her own age, and finally she smells like a dog sometimes when she arrives at school. The teachers are always trying to correct her language, because she speaks with dialecticisms. She starts seeing the school counsellor, who gives her reading and breathing exercises to do. She feels sorry for Marta because other children make fun of her for being fat and for not being good at Maths. She starts attending theatre classes outside school, and the family goes to drink coffee after lunch on a Sunday in an attempt to appear normal, but what she really wants is to stay at home with her grandmother and Perdida.

The narrator asks her mother what her reaction was at the time of the fire. Her mother replies that she and her father tried desperately to reach them, but all the roads were closed. Her father even burst into tears. She had heard about the fire at five in the afternoon and tried ringing Brais’s father, Antonio, since he had a mobile, but they hadn’t been able to get through. They are on a bus, which has broken down, and her mother is desperate to do a wee. The narrator feels safe in Neboeiro with her grandmother. When she has a fever, her grandmother looks after her, fetching eucalyptus leaves so she can make a steam inhalation, allowing Perdida to sleep in the house, simple gestures which are an indirect way of saying she loves her.

In the second part, the narrator’s grandmother is growing old. She is unable to keep the surrounding vegetation at bay and is afraid it will eat up the house, despite their best efforts. One day, her grandmother insists on going to the local shop to buy toilet paper, but she doesn’t take the road, she goes by the railway line. When they reach the railway bridge over the river, the narrator refuses to go any further, because there isn’t room for them if a train should pass by. There is a struggle between them as she tries to impose her will, and her grandmother falls over, spraining her ankle. It is at this point that the grandmother seems to realize that she is getting old and can’t look after herself, but the others don’t see this.

The narrator has a secret. During Holy Week, she has been meeting up with Carlos, who suggested that they get off together. He touches her beneath her knickers, producing a pleasure she hasn’t experienced before, and invites her to touch him as well. She is too ashamed to tell her grandmother. When it appears that Perdida is pregnant and is going to have another litter, the narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that she might be pregnant too, if Carlos had touched himself before touching her, and wonders how she will tell her parents. She is afraid that people in the village will be comparing her to another woman, Dora, who had four sons by four different men. She cannot help touching herself in bed at night to reproduce the pleasure she felt at the fountain.

On a visit to the village with her mother after the fire, the narrator laments the neglect and disrepair of the houses belonging to Dora, Nucha, Manolo do Chencho, her grandmother. Her mother wants to sell the house, so another family can live there and make it pretty again, perhaps building a swimming pool where the shed had been, but the narrator resists this idea, since it would mean letting go of her grandmother. Her grandmother becomes very obsessed with a crab apple tree in the vicinity of the house, where the land is all overgrown. She wants the narrator’s father to clear the undergrowth so she can reach it and enjoy its fruit, but the father is too tired from work. Then she says she will do it herself and launches into a tirade against the narrator’s mother, saying they are not welcome there anymore. She decides to start a fire.

A fig tree survives the fire, and some ivy grows up it. One acts as a support, the other as a parasite. The narrator compares the ivy to the fear that climbs up her body. Or to her relationships with her mother and her grandmother, sometimes acting as a support, other times as a parasite. During the two days that they stay away from Neboeiro, the narrator shaves her privates. Brais has been on the attack again, telling the other students that the narrator has a carpet down below. The narrator feels betrayed that Carlos should tell Brais about their relationship. Others around her have difficulties – her friend Marta goes into the toilet to vomit what she has eaten because she is worried she is fat; her mother hides in her room so she can cry about the breakdown in her relationship with the narrator’s grandmother. But they do not share their problems. After two days, things return to normal, and the narrator goes back to spending time with her grandmother.

The cause of their reconciliation is Perdida giving birth to five puppies. The narrator goes with her parents to watch this happen. Nucha, the neighbour, acts as midwife. In the presence of the puppies, the narrator stops worrying about other things and everything is calm. The narrator finds the idea of giving birth romantic, but not exactly desirable, since you have to give up a part of your flesh, like a tree losing a branch. Her grandmother continues to deteriorate. The plants are no longer looked after, the house begins to smell. They spend time with Nucha and plan, the three of them, to visit a spa, even though the narrator knows this is never going to happen. During the summer, the narrator meets up with Carlos again at the fountain, but he is rougher now, less considerate. Another time, he arrives with Brais, saying she is not his girlfriend, and puts his hands on her body. The narrator is so distressed she collapses when she gets back home.

Her grandmother decides to put poison down to kill off the vegetation separating her from the crab apple tree, even though it is harmful to animals and humans. The narrator’s mother is furious. When Nucha dies, they tell the grandmother that she has gone to the spa. There is a heat wave, and the narrator and her grandmother stay at home, reading fashion magazines. The narrator and her mother attend Nucha’s funeral. It is a very hot day. They pretend they are going to the dentist. When they get back, they eat peaches in the yard. The narrator finds it ironic that they should clear the vegetation around the house in order to put it on the market, but not when the grandmother asked them to do this. They both resist the arrival of September and a new school year – the grandmother because she doesn’t want to be left alone.

The narrator regrets that, with her own problems, she didn’t look out for her friend Marta, who had called her over the summer. She wasn’t a good friend to her. At five in the morning, her grandmother sets fire to the brambles around the cork apple tree, hoping in this way to gain access. She stands by the road with a jug half full of water to stop the fire, should it get out of control. Manolo do Chencho comes to put out the fire. He then calls a local councillor to go to the grandmother’s house and warn her against starting fires. The grandmother is incensed, she has the right to set fire to anything of hers, and sets the dog, Perdida, on the two of them. She is aware that Nucha has died. The narrator goes to visit her friend Marta. She is absent from school and suffering from anorexia. On the way home from school, Brais catches her on her own. He touches her between the legs and tries to get her to give him fellatio. The narrator believes she deserves this treatment because she has let Carlos touch her and taken pleasure in it.

The final section is called “The Fire”. The narrator shares her predilection for fire, which she describes as “terrifying and beautiful”. She is convinced her grandmother was not a pyromaniac, she just needed fire to keep warm, to do the cooking, and to get rid of the vegetation. One day in October, her grandmother notices a fire on the other side of the river, in Portugal. A helicopter laden with water flies overhead. The narrator wouldn’t mind burning herself or seeing Brais go up in flames. Her grandmother drops a jar of salt, which signifies bad luck. The narrator cannot understand the attention her parents give the house in Neboeiro in order to sell it. She would like to get rid of some of the hate she feels for that place, but doesn’t want to lose her fond memories, which are associated with her grandmother and Perdida.

The fire spreads from Portugal. Some eucalyptus trees catch alight. Manolo do Chencho’s house is the first to burn. Dora’s house is the next to burn. The neighbours gather and endeavour to fight the fire by bringing baskets of water. The thing that affected the narrator most about the fire was the death of Perdida and her puppies, since they were shut up in the shed. Perdida had become their dog, no longer a stray. At six in the evening, the neighbours give up fighting the fire and are told to leave the village for their own safety. Her grandmother, however, insists on returning to her house, and the narrator goes with her, even though they can barely breathe.

The following weekend, lots of news outlets and curious onlookers visit Neboeiro to take photos of the wreckage, the dead animals, the burnt-out cars. By the time they reach the house, the shed with Perdida and her puppies is on fire. The only way they can escape is to go down to the river. Her grandmother spent some time in hospital and was then admitted to a clinic with Alzheimer’s. The narrator laments that she no longer knows who she is. On escaping the fire, the narrator and her grandmother take refuge in the river, up to their chests in water. When there is a fire, the mountain shudders because of all the little animals running away.

The whole of the narrative is an exercise in writing which the narrator has been given to get over the trauma of what has happened. We only learn her name right at the end: Sabela. After the fire, her grandmother thinks she is her sister who died at the age of fourteen, Laura. The fire is really a metaphor for the loss of security the narrator feels, a security she found in her grandmother’s embrace and the time they spent together. It wasn’t a perfect world – there were those who treated her badly, Brais and his cousin Carlos, and others who suffered, like Marta. It is more a way of life that has been lost – the fire in the kitchen stove that kept them warm, the burning pinecones, which has an atmosphere all of its own, unlike the heating in their modern apartment in the city. The story of the fire is really the story of her grandmother’s loss of memory. All that is left is the skeleton of the fig tree, her house, and the nascent grass in the fields around.

This is Sara Vila Alonso’s second novel and it won her the Blanco Amor Award for long novels in the Galician language.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne