Alfredo Conde
Biography
Alfredo Conde studied navigation and history and has worked as a merchant seaman and as a history teacher. He was an independent MP and Minister of Culture in the regional Galician government during the late 1980s, and also the first president of the Galician PEN Club. He is best known for his fiction, written in both the Galician and Spanish languages. His novel The Griffon won the Spanish National Book Award, the Blanco Amor Prize for novels and the prestigious Grinzane Cavour Prize for best foreign fiction. His novel The Other Days received one of Spain’s oldest literary awards, the Premio Nadal. Another of his novels, Romasanta: Uncertain Memoirs of the Galician Wolfman, has been made into a film.
Photograph © Luis Carré
ROMASANTA: UNCERTAIN MEMOIRS OF THE GALICIAN WOLFMAN synopsis
Romasanta: Uncertain Memoirs of the Galician Wolfman (158 pages) retells the story of Spain’s first documented serial killer, Manuel Blanco Romasanta, who had previously been portrayed as a travelling salesman who attacked his victims without being aware of what he was doing. Owing to a complicated court case and some scientific quackery, the defendant was eventually pardoned by Isabella II of Spain. Alfredo Conde, a descendant of one of the doctors involved in the case, chose to portray him as a merciless killer who was out to get rich in a book that was later made into a film, Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt (2004).
ROMASANTA: UNCERTAIN MEMOIRS OF THE GALICIAN WOLFMAN
CHAPTER I
My name is Manuel Blanco Romasanta. As I sit down to write these memoirs I am about to turn forty-three. In my part of the world I am known as O Tendeiro, the salesman, but I shall go down in history as The Wolf Man. Of that I am positive. Nevertheless, the mob, the greatest simpletons, who may also be the shrewdest, will go on calling me in Galician “O Homo de Unto”, as well as “O Saca Manteigas”, the man who sucks human fat.
Regueiro lies near Esgos. It is a small place, not even a small village, located just down from the church at Santa Baia, from where Regueiro, as well as the parishes of de Sontelo and A Lama, have always been administered. My home, the same house where I was born into this world, sits precisely at the start of the road that descends from the parish church, just as you enter the small cluster of houses that make up Regueiro.
To get to Esgos from Regueiro you have to leave the village and pass directly in front of my house before taking the road that leads to A Lama. After crossing the village you go on climbing, as if you were heading towards the top of O Couso, but before you reach it you must take a left turn and descend along the main road until you reach Esgos, which is close by. Indeed, you could say that Esgos lies a little too close for comfort.
From the front of my house, if you look over and beyond its tiled roof, you can see the summit of Mount Castelo, which is somewhat steeper than the peaks nearby. I know all of them well from having criss-crossed them often, travelling in the opposite direction to that always used by the “Maragatos” when they come here from their land. As long as I can remember, the Maragatos have always come carrying their merchandise in drays, or just loaded on the backs of mules. If you go in the opposite direction from the one taken by them from the summit of O Couso, you get to A Rúa. From there you make your way to Barco de Valdeorras, and then, following the course of the River Sil, passing close to As Médulas, you enter O Bierzo. You then go through Ponferrada, after crossing Foncebadón, and you reach Val de San Lorenzo, which is already in La Maragatería. I always envied these Maragatos, and felt a deep and abiding admiration for them. Maybe it is for this, and other reasons that will become apparent in due course, that I undertook, in these, and some even more exotic surroundings, my first and one and only chosen profession. For I became a travelling salesman, a career that provided me with enough money for greater and more arduous enterprises, and from which I would ultimately become the rich man I had always dreamed of becoming. To this day I am faithful to my calling.