Translation Rights TQE / The Fig Tree

In 1966 the construction of a new high school in Getxo (a town in the Basque Country) brings to life the story of a solitary man who, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, decided to confine himself to his land and care for a fig tree. His name was Rogelio Ceron, one of the men fighting on the national front who had gone door-to-door in Getxo taking men from their homes to execute them in front of the cemetery walls. During one of his house visits, Ceron had to endure a look of hatred from a little boy who resisted having his father taken away, and, at that moment, he knew for sure that, when the boy grew up, he would kill him. This feeling increased the following day when he found that someone had planted a fig tree on the common grave of the executed men. Ceron would never be the same again and, from that point on, he would carefully supervise the life of the boy, trying to distance him from Getxo, paying for his studies to avoid the malediction – the unbearable return of the guilt from his past.

This novel is a demonstration of Ramiro Pinilla at his best creative moment. La higuera is a masterful novel about vengeance and forgiveness, about defeat and humiliation, about the unexpected ways in which History mocks us, sentencing the destiny of all men.

Ramiro Pinilla was born in Bilbao in 1923. He won the Nadal Prize in 1960 and the National Prize of the Critics in 1961 with the novel Las ciegas hormigas (The Blind Ants), and was a finalist to the Planeta Prize in 1971 with Seno (Breast).  For almost three decades he voluntarily distanced himself from the publishing industry. During that time, Pinilla published his own works, such as En el tiempo de los tallos verdes (In the Age of Green Stems, 1969), Recuerda, oh recuerda (Remember, Oh Remember, 1974), Primeras historias de la Guerra interminable (The First Stories of the Never-ending War, 1977), La gran guerra de Doña Toda (The Great War of Mrs. Toda, 1978), Andanzas de Txiqui Baskardo (The Adventures of Txiqui Baskardo, 1980), Quince años (Fifteen Years, 1990), and Huesos (Bones, 1997). Pinilla returned to the publishing circuit with Verdes valles, Colinas rojas (Green Vallies, Red Hills), a trilogy made up of the novels La tierra convulsa (The Earth Trembles), Los cuerpos desnudos (Naked Bodies), and Las cenizas del hierro (Iron Ashes) that won the Euskadi Prize 2005, the National Critics Prize, and the National Prize for Narrative in 2006. That same year, Pinilla published La higuera (The Fig Tree), a novel about the Civil War, humiliation, and forgiveness that is currently being translated into several languages.