Santander, 1936

The protagonist of this novel is called Álvaro Pombo Caller, and friends and family call him -although he doesn't like it- Alvarito, or Alvarín. The Álvaro Pombo Caller of the novel, blood uncle of our author Álvaro Pombo, is nineteen years old in 1936. In the provincial Santander of that time, as in all of Spain, the left-right confrontation, fierce intellectual debates and exalted proclamations burned policies. Alvarín, with his youthful fervor and his admiration for José Antonio Primo de Rivera, joined the Spanish Falange in 1934. His father, Cayo Pombo Ybarra, is an agnostic and republican liberal, an admirer of Manuel Azaña. Despite their political differences, father and son love each other very much and get along very well. Alvarín's mother, Ana Caller Donesteve, the famous Ana de Pombo, triumphant in the Parisian fashion of those years, has left her husband Cayo de ella in Santander and has distributed her children in English and French schools. There is an intense epistolary correspondence, very much of the time, between Ana and hers, her son, Álvaro hers. The Santander of the royal summer vacation of Alfonso XIII and his family, who have left Spain after the proclamation of the Second Republic, has already been left behind.