La carta

On the day he turns fifty, the businessman Luis Casas, owner of a well-known fashion store in the center of San Sebastián, Basque by personal decision, receives a letter: "You and the class to which you belong are contributing ideologically and economically Through the payment of taxes to support the police state / in return, what you willingly facilitate to our national and class enemies is demanded in return: an economic amount in concept of collaboration in the struggle of the working people / If he does not do so, he will be treated accordingly / executed wherever he is / 50 million pesetas in used discontinuous numbering notes / if he does not do so within the established period, we will look for him until he is executed". "La carta", originally published in 1990 and reissued as a tribute to its author in the year of his death, is perhaps the fundamental novel by Raúl Guerra Garrido, the one that best concentrates his extraordinary capacity as a narrator in the story of anguish, persecution and impossible decisions that the card triggers.