This novel, which consists of seven stories, or even this short narrative, is the paradigm of many mixtures. In this way, the gas station that appears on the cover of the book takes a larger trace of the telephone booths that are seen in London than the gasoline filling devices of the gas stations. But no, in the area of Irun, it is a gas station located somewhere in the area of Behobia. Although this space is real enough, it also becomes the meeting point for all fantasies. In fact, this story by Ugarte has a lot of reality and a lot of fantasy. He breaks down boundaries and uses any narrative excuse to jump from one to another. The protagonist himself is quite real, in fact, because despite studying Fine Arts, he works in a gas station as a mileurist. However, since he stopped painting paintings from a very young age for choreography, he has shown a passion for fantasy and has been organizing opera stages.
The gas station is “the ideal setting for a postmodern opera house”. However, near the gas station is the Arantoki farmhouse. Roke, from the Arantoki farm, opened the village's first pub, called Funkytown. If stories are in a constant leap from reality to fantasy, spaces have also been taken and not to mention characters.
Around the protagonist, strange characters will join each one as the heir to their story. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, not photographed as vampires; the dancer Inés Land, who flew; the Romanian Claudiu, born on the Isle of Serpents, around the Black Sea that ends in the Danube; Peru, the “curosa” of classical Greek art. Roke from the Arantoki farm, the black crow. Veronika, a woman in love who follows Peru and/or a woman that Peru can't get out of her head. Each character has its own story and joins the protagonist around the gas station. All of these stories are generally fantastic, even though they actually take their foot in reality. The recreation of this fantasy is sometimes framed in the constant references to painting. Renoir’s field next to the gas station, Patinir’s paintings, the birth of Botticelli’s Venus. In this short narrative where the protagonist connects the past and the present in the first person, we should mention the signs of fantastic realism.
If we had to highlight something else from this novel, it would be a choreographic work, since the spaces are very well expressed and colored and each space has its own story and its own characters. From the spatiality, the characterizations of the characters and the tones of the narration are born from the colors. Red, derived from the semantics of fire, slightly surreal, realistic and dreamlike in the same way.