The Same City
Page 9
Many months after all this happened, I also decided to write a fictional story inspired by the adventures of Brandon Moy. I had intended to change the names and some of the more incidental circumstances, but the essence of the story was going to be identical to the real one. I made notes, as I always do, drafted a few speculative reflections about identity and the meaning of life, collected some photographs of the places where Moy had been, and read books and records about the September 11 attacks to familiarize myself with it all. Glancing over a report I found online about the planes that were hijacked that day, I saw by chance a name that astounded me and convinced me once and for all that Brandon Moy’s existence was either a parable or a tall tale—among the passengers on American Airlines Flight 11, which, under the direction of Mohamed Atta, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was Albert Fergus. He was returning to Los Angeles from Boston, where he had flown just after running into Moy as he was leaving the Continental.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Luisgé Martín is a multi-awarded Spanish writer born in Madrid in 1962. He has published the short story collections Los oscuros (1990) El alma del erizo (2002) and Todos los crímenes se cometen por amor (2013); the collection of correspondence Amante del sexo busca pareja morbosa (2002); and the book of travels Donde el silencio (2013). Along with The Same City and Woman in Darkness, published in English by Hispabooks, his novels include La dulce ira (1995), La muerte de Tadzio (2000)—winner of the Premio Ramón Gómez de la Serna—Los amores confiados (2005), Las manos cortadas (2009), and his latest release, La vida equivocada (2015). He has also worked as an editor for Ediciones SM and in Ediciones del Prado and he contributes occasionally to El Viajero, Babelia, El País and other Spanish publications.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Tomasz Dukanovich is a self-taught Spanish-English translator who lives in Madrid. He has had a very varied professional background, having been a pianist, social worker, lawyer and language teacher. As a translator he has mainly specialized in the business and legal fields but has also worked on a wide range of projects going from art, history and philosophy through to psychiatry. Relatively new in the world of literary translation, he is now beginning to work more and more in this area for which he has discovered a real passion.
HISPABOOKS
Contemporary Spanish fiction in English-language translation
www.hispabooks.com