After publishing the collection of stories Ukabilak eta LOREAK (2015), Julen Belamuno returns with a long narration: Night watchman. From the same title we get information about the character's profession. When we start reading at night, we are presented as a character in charge of observing that everything is still in order in an aluminum factory. However, as we move forward in the narrative, beyond being a craft the night caretaker, we realize that it is a name that collects an identity. Who, then, is the night watchman?
The night caretaker is an isolated, obsessive character (furious lover of the order), without friends or family. He has followed the same steps as his father without questioning anything, because he fears that any question may upset his orderly and regular world, and has maintained, as a religious rite, the rigid awareness of his father’s duty. It can therefore be said that he has made his name and his being with work. What happens if the gear wheel in the footprint is interrupted? Who was the caregiver at night?
Around this (des) construction of an identity is embodied the guiding thread of the novel. Then the questions that give an existentialist tone to the narration will begin: What difference is there, after all, between what has been and what has not been anything? (page 41), where are the events of the past going? (page 46), what life would I have if [...] I would have preferred not to be a guard? (page 152).
After twenty-eight years of loyal dedication, in which the sum of the services of father and son takes him almost fifty (page 151), the character is forced to abandon his job. Thanks to advanced technologies, his position will be replaced by vesilances chambers, and the novel is located on the last night he will be in the factory. However, on that night of the end of a past world and of transition to a new life, the character is not able to project his future because he has pursued with inertia the life he has received. Instead, it will nostically revisit the past: times when night care was strong (55.orrialdea), the time when water was more transparent and clean (page 104), times when church bells were used to spread sinister rather than sirens (page 122).
He's a man who asks where he comes from and where he goes. That is why it is innominate, because we all keep a past of the present that makes us today and that will then turn us.
Idazlea: Julen Belamuno
Argitaletxea: Elkar, 2016
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