THE GUARDIAN OF BONFIRES

Reinaldo is a librarian in an isolated city near a river where nobody knows how to read except him. The pages of the books are only used for making the fire of the bonfires that enclose the city and protects the city of the mosquitoes, transmitters of an strange illness. 

Those who fall ill are expelled of the city. A scientific committee certifies their infection and, in the silent presence of the citizens, the police make them cross the bonfires and row to the other edge so they can’t return.  

In the city nobody talks about the past. Writing was forbidden some time ago and the knowledge has been lost. Inhabitants live subdued with docility to the authority will: doctors, governors, the police head. Nobody rebels against nor tries to escape.

Reinaldo begins to question the habits of the city and the conformism of the inhabitants when his daughter, going to be thirteen soon, has to pass the adult ceremony: she would have to pass one night in a closed place with spider-monkeys. Only then he will begin to think that it’s possible to trespass the limits. Published in Spanish by Editorial EDAF