Ruben David Gonzalez Gallego. White on black. “White on Black” Ruben David Gonzalez Gallego Gonzalez white and black summary

29.06.2019

Black and white

Taken: , 1

Introduction by Sergei Yurjenen

The mother was separated from her son and was told he had died. Thirty years later he suddenly rose from the dead.

The plot rhymes with the throne, tyranny, the “iron mask” and the wells of oblivion.

But these are our places and times.

One of the stone bags where the minor prisoner was kept was called the Karl Marx Research Institute. With two active fingers, he is now entering his biography into the “black book” of international communism.

Black letters on a white ceiling, and at night white on black, bring to life, of course, specialized literature. Cherney Selina, the early Selah (who wrote his provincial freaks and fools from outside), Carver. Blacker than even Shalamov and others who returned and proclaimed the truth that for a writer, the worse, the better. This non-fiction occurs outside the boundaries of “normal” horror, that which is creepy for normal, so to speak, people. Moreover, there is no look that was frozen once and for all in Kolyma, there is no cynicism, no special “pile up” of macabre (which, I remember, Tvardovsky credited to “Ivan Denisovich”). There is a keen interest in imputed life, there is compassion, love, naivety - there is awe and a living feeling. You call him on the phone in Madrid: “How are you?” The answer is always the same, like a password, like a symbol of faith: “Alive!” The Mundo newspaper wrote: “His forty-five kilograms are forty-five kilograms of optimism.” In “Arguments and Facts” the article about him is crazy, of course, but the title cannot be denied exactly: “Macho in wheelchair" It is what it is. Our writer is no stranger to machismo. That's why he has such a name.

As experimental psychology shows, any human group, starting with a single family, tends to create an “enemy image” within itself. Unfortunately, this is where it began. In the large family of one of the leaders of the Spanish Communist Party, whose leadership fought against Francoism from Paris, the “black sheep” became eldest daughter. Aurora emerged from the lyceum in the mid-60s so free-thinking that instead of the Sorbonne, the Leader sent her for “re-education” to Moscow, fortunately, the Spaniards, led by her senior comrade-in-arms and friend, Honorary President of the Party Dolores Ibarruri, fought there against Franco (see the novel by Sergei Yurjenen “Daughter of the General Secretary”, M., VneshSigma, 1999).

On Lenin Mountains a Parisian Spaniard meets a Venezuelan student, a guerrilla from Caracas, who fled from the junta overseas - to the land of ideals. Wedding on the eighteenth floor of a Stalinist high-rise building. Pregnancy without proper control. The sudden discovery that there will be twins. While on his way to the Crimean vacation, the Leader is forced to set up a Kremlin hospital, which is politically not so easy in light of the brutal actions of Big Brother, who just at this moment decides to step on the “human face” of Czechoslovak socialism with his tarpaulin boot. Further - worse. Ten days after giving birth, one twin dies, the other is given a terrible diagnosis - cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy.

And then the political thriller begins. For a purely private tragedy fits into an acute inter-party conflict. The Communist Party of Spain condemns the CPSU for Prague, the CPSU condemns the PCI for “Eurocommunism.” The Leader's daughter, who has already been with her son for a year closed establishment, actually becomes a hostage of the Kremlin. In principle, the situation can be resolved by returning the daughter and grandson to Paris. But this Paris is by no means a holiday. For the Leader, Paris is a springboard and outpost of the fight against Francoism. And if official Paris turns a blind eye to this activity, then official Madrid is actively counterattacking. Julian Grimau, secretary of the underground Madrid city committee, who “fell” from the window of the “Ministry of Fear” on Puerta del Sol, was arrested on the way to an appearance with the Leader - who constantly makes trips across the Pyrenees to the inside of the Boa constrictor and back. There is nothing worse for Franco than the “reds”. In order to screw the garrote on the Red's throat, the Generalissimo is ready to do anything - even to make a deal with the Kremlin Satan. After Caudillo’s death, his Jamesbond, nicknamed “Swan,” will tell the world about mutually beneficial contacts between Franco’s intelligence service and the KGB, which paid for information about the bases of the “main enemy” in Spain with lists of illegal Spanish communists. So the Leader’s paranoia “in all azimuths” was more than justified.

Who made the decision is shrouded in darkness. But the situation, which, of course, was discussed at the highest levels, was resolved at the level of individual destinies without ceremony or formality. Aurora, who had gone to the Lenin Hills to take exams, was urgently called back and showed her son in intensive care. The boy was in agony. A few days later they called her at the hostel: “He has died.” As with the first twin - no death certificate, no birth certificate. The topic is closed - at least bang your head against the gates of the Kremlin. This is in relation to mother and father. Well, for those initiated into the secret organized from above, there is no special tension either. Well, he died. Died - Schumer. If only he was healthy...

The Venezuelan broke down and flew to the West - beyond the scope of the plot.

Aurora, on the contrary, has become radicalized. Her family kept her at a safe distance - in Moscow. Seven years later, she managed to return to France, where she took a dissident young writer and their daughter, who was safely born in an ordinary Moscow maternity hospital. Paris provided them with political asylum from world communism.

The leader was already in Spain. Juan Carlos II legalized the Communist Party after Franco's death. The leader became a member of the Cortes - the Spanish parliament, then vice-president and in this capacity, together with the king and the leaders of other parties, signed the first democratic Constitution of Spain. The plenipotentiary ambassador of his Communist Party, he began to fly around the world even more intensively, without skimping, of course, on Moscow, where his comrades “for information” brought to his attention how his daughter and Russian son-in-law were serving American imperialism on Radio Liberty.

Did you remember your grandson?

Maybe.

After the trauma of childbirth, the twenty-year-old mother fell into shock, which Aurora now recalls as a year-long period of autism, total muteness and such a deep symbiosis with the surviving twin that she did not even call him mentally. Not even “my little one.” He was an inseparable part of her, which she was afraid to tear away with sound. Thus - nameless - they took him away, declaring him dead. But someone then ordered to give the boy a name from the calendar of the Spanish Communist Party - Ruben. That was the name of Ibarruri’s son, who died at Stalingrad. This is how the Leader named his first son. But if so, then this name assigned “from above” was already a kind of safe-conduct for the unusual DTS officer on his way for official reasons.

This boy, in whose blood Andalusia, where his grandfather is from, mixed with the Basque Country, where his grandmother is from, and all this together with Indians and Latin American Chinese - “Chinos”, was taken from the Kremlin hospitals to the village of Kartashevo near Volkhov, where he spent four years, then to the aforementioned Leningrad Research Institute, from there to the Bryansk region, to the city of Trubchevsk, then to the Penza region, to the workers’ village of an electric lamp plant called Nizhny Lomov and, finally, to the city of the executed proletariat - Novocherkassk. Here he graduated from two colleges - English and law. He got married and gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Earned money for a computer. Traveled to America - from New York to San Francisco. Came back, got divorced and married again. The second daughter, again a beauty. The Spanish-Lithuanian director decided to make a documentary about him. In 2000, a film group took it along the route Novocherkassk - Moscow - Madrid - Paris - Prague. It is not for nothing that the capital of the Czech Republic is called the “mother of cities”. Here Ruben found his mother and chose to stay with her. However, the concept of the film about a child abandoned to his own devices collapsed. But the media showed interest in the story, both in Russia and Spain.

The “American dream” of mobility has also come true. The stroller, manufactured in Munich, is controlled by two fingers, reaching a speed that is impossible to keep up with - fifteen kilometers per hour.

Blessed by the Prince of Asturias and the local diplomatic corps, mother and son returned to their historical homeland. The plane landed at Madrid airport on September 22, 2001. The day before, Ruben turned thirty-three.

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for private or public use without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Just letters, letters on the ceiling, slowly crawling white letters on a black background. They began to appear at night after another heart attack. I could move these letters across the ceiling and form words and sentences from them. The next morning all that remained was to write them into the computer’s memory.

Preface to the Russian edition

About strength and kindness

People sometimes ask me if what I write about actually happened? Are the heroes of my stories real?

I answer: it was, real; more than real. Of course, my heroes - collective images the endless kaleidoscope of my endless orphanages. But what I write about is true.

The only feature of my work, which diverges and sometimes contradicts life’s authenticity, is the author’s view, perhaps somewhat sentimental, sometimes breaking into pathos. I deliberately avoid writing about the bad.

I am sure that life and literature are already too full of black stuff. It so happened that I had to see too much human cruelty and anger. To describe the abomination of human fall and animal bestiality is to multiply the already endless chain of interconnected charges of evil. Don't want. I write about goodness, victory, joy and love.

I write about strength. Spiritual and physical strength. The strength that exists in each of us. The force that breaks through all barriers and wins. Every story I tell is a story of victory. Even the boy from the slightly sad story “Cutlet” wins. Wins twice. The first is when, from the chaotic rubbish of unnecessary knowledge, he, in the absence of a knife, finds the only three words that affect his opponent. The second is when he decides to eat cutlets, that is, to live.

Those for whom the only victorious outcome is voluntary death also win. A combat officer who dies in the face of superior enemy forces, who dies according to the Charter, is a winner. I respect such people. But all the same, the main thing in this person is Stuffed Toys. I am sure that sewing bears and bunnies all your life is much more difficult than sawing your own throat once. I am convinced that children's joy comes from new toy is worth much more on the human scale than any military victory.

This is a book about my childhood. Cruel, scary, but still childhood. To maintain a love for the world, to grow and mature, a child needs very little: a piece of bacon, a sausage sandwich, a handful of dates, a blue sky, a couple of books and a warm human word. This is enough, this is more than enough.

The heroes of this book are strong, very strong people. A person very often needs to be strong. And kind. Not everyone can allow themselves to be kind; not everyone is able to step over the barrier of general misunderstanding. Too often kindness is mistaken for weakness. It is sad. Being human is difficult, very difficult, but quite possible. You don't have to stand on your hind legs to do this. Not at all necessary. I believe in it.

I am a hero. It's easy to be a hero. If you don't have arms or legs, you are a hero or a dead man. If you don't have parents, rely on your own hands and feet. And be a hero. If you have neither arms nor legs, and you also managed to be born an orphan, that’s it. You are doomed to be a hero for the rest of your days. Or die. I am a hero. I simply have no other choice.

I am a little boy. Night. Winter. I need to go to the toilet. Calling a nanny is useless.

There is only one way out - crawl to the toilet.

First you need to get out of bed. There is a way, I came up with it myself. I simply crawl to the edge of the bed and roll over onto my back, throwing my body onto the floor. Hit. Pain.

I crawl to the door to the corridor, push it with my head and crawl out of the relatively warm room into the cold and darkness.

At night all the windows in the corridor are open. It's cold, very cold. I am naked.

Crawl far. When I crawl past the room where the nannies are sleeping, I try to call for help, I knock on their door with my head. Nobody responds. I scream. No one. Maybe I'm silently screaming.

By the time I get to the toilet, I’m completely freezing.

In the toilet the windows are open, there is snow on the windowsill.

I get to the potty. Resting. I definitely need to rest before crawling back. While I’m resting, the urine in the pot is covered with an ice crust.

I'm crawling back. I pull the blanket off my bed with my teeth, somehow wrap myself in it and try to fall asleep.

And the next morning they will dress me and take me to school. In history class I will cheerfully talk about horrors fascist concentration camps. I'll get an A. I always get straight A's in history. I have A's in all subjects. I am a hero.

The bayonet is an excellent thing, reliable. One hit and the enemy falls. The bayonet pierces the enemy's body right through. The bayonet never fails, the bayonet hits for sure. The bullet hits at random, the bullet is a fool. A bullet can pass tangentially, a bullet can get stuck in the body and meanly undermine human life from the inside. A bayonet is not a bullet, a bayonet is a bladed weapon, the last fragment of the nineteenth century.

On the cover of Nikolai Ostrovsky's first book there is an embossed bayonet. The blind, paralyzed writer could not reread his book himself. All he could do was run his fingers along the outline of the bayonet again and again. The most durable bayonet in the world is a paper bayonet.

The ancient Vikings are the best warriors in the world. Fearless warriors, people with strong spirit. It’s too early to discount a Viking who fell in battle. Viking fallen in battle last impulse the passing life squeezed the enemy's leg with his teeth. Dying slowly, cursing your worthless life, tormenting yourself and your loved ones with endless complaints about your unfortunate fate is the lot of the weak. The eternal Hamlet question does not concern a soldier in battle. Living in battle and dying in battle are the same thing. To live half-heartedly and die half-heartedly, in make-believe, is disgusting and disgusting. The most a mortal can hope for is to die fighting. If you are lucky, if you are very lucky, you can die in flight. Die holding a horse's bridle or the steering wheel of a fighter plane, a saber or machine gun, a blacksmith's hammer or a chess king in your hand. If a hand is cut off in battle, it doesn’t matter. You can intercept the blade with your other hand. If you fall, all is not lost. There remains a chance, a small chance, to die like a Viking, squeezing the enemy’s heel with his teeth. Not everyone is lucky, not everyone has it. Homer and Beethoven are happy exceptions that only confirm the insignificance of the chances. But we have to fight, there is no other way, any other way is dishonest and stupid.

I cried over the book. Books, like people, are different. If you think about it, if you think about it very hard, comics are also books. Beautiful books With beautiful pictures. Funny toys - ephemera paper butterflies, comics have a huge advantage over other books: children don’t cry over them. Cheerful little children have no need to cry over books. The question “to be or not to be” has no meaning for them. They are children, just children, it’s too early for them to think. I read the book, read and cried. He cried from powerlessness and envy. I wanted to go there, I wanted to go into battle, but it was impossible to go into battle. I couldn’t do anything, I was used to it, but I still cried. There are books that change your view of the world, books that make you want to die or live differently.

White on black
I am a hero. It's easy to be a hero.
If you don't have arms or legs, you are a hero or a dead man.
If you don't have parents, rely on your own hands and feet.
And be a hero.
If you have neither arms nor legs,
and you also managed to be born an orphan, that’s all.
You are doomed to be a hero for the rest of your days.
Or die.
I am a hero. I simply have no other choice.

Books about disabled people are different. There are touching stories about overcoming, about how one should not give up even in the most disgusting circumstances, about how one should always strive forward, without seeing obstacles in front of oneself. There are other stories that tell about everything, as it seems, as close to reality as possible, full of black melancholy, confidence that there is nothing worse than the fate of a disabled person, in which the question “Or maybe it’s better for them not?” can be read between the lines. There are fairy tales, one of those where an armless boy turns out to be a wise sphinx, the legless ones get up and start dancing, and the blind see.
And there are books about the truth. Stories that combine all the features already listed, in which sadness and joy, despair and faith, fairy tale and life, good, evil and nothing are confused.
White on black is one of those.
And you can read it in very different ways.
This is a book about how a boy with cerebral palsy from a family of diplomats ends up in an orphanage, seemingly doomed to death, grows up and flies overseas. About how his life, hungry and cold, is transformed, and he can already type a book on a computer. About how strange human destiny can be.
This is a book about how cruel and hopeless life can be for a person with cerebral palsy. When with anyone, the most simple action, someone should help. When you are judged on whether you can stand up on your own two feet or not. When no one in the world cares about you, a piece of meat.
This is a book about how in any, even the most hopeless situation, there is something good. About how, without having much, you learn to enjoy little. About how, unable to stand up, you crawl. About how evil people can be and how good they can be.
But the most important thing about it is that it is a book about life. That life should simply be lived and that its smallest joys can be a real revelation. For many, White on Black can be a lesson, an example to follow, and good motivation.
It will show the healthy that even standing on your feet is a pleasure no longer available to anyone. That the opportunity to go outside is a great blessing. The book will remind a healthy person that he is healthy, that his problems are a trifle compared to someone else’s problems, that in the most disgusting situation, when you don’t want to live, you can get up and go, which means you can achieve anything.
She will let the patient know that life is not over. That if a boy from a rural orphanage managed it, then he can do it too. That everything is achievable, and that if you can’t walk, you need to crawl, just don’t stop.
White on black is written very simply. But despite this, and perhaps precisely because of this, it slightly changes the reader’s world. You are imperceptibly drawn into it, you read it in one gulp, and when you raise your head and emerge, you understand that life is wonderful.
And eat simple potatoes with enviable appetite.
Because this is the property of this book - to change the point of view even a little bit so that everything else changes with it.

Support the project Comments

sendoka

Olgie wrote:

52111877 Isn’t there the text itself?

It's probably there somewhere.
Natalia M (25.10.2011 - 17:35:01)
I read the book a long time ago. And three years ago I found myself in intensive care, completely paralyzed with only one functioning finger. right hand.. For a month I tapped them on a tablet with the alphabet in order to somehow communicate with others. I remembered the book more than once... I never thought that I would find myself in the same position as the author. But I was incredibly lucky - unlike Gallego, the people who surrounded me were wonderful. I was paralyzed for 4 months, but I still get goosebumps from the memories of my own helplessness, and a person lives with it... This is unspeakable courage... This is the harsh truth.

igor9966

icf1976 wrote:

57079964 This book is a must school curriculum enter. So that children can read and feel other people's pain. So that they grow up and never become like the freaks in the Duma and the Kremlin, who robbed people like Gallego of their children, hope and future.

Come on, the majority of Russian people supported the ban - the overwhelming majority of Russian people are not liberals at all

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Ruben David Gonzalez Gallego (born September 20, 1968, Moscow, USSR) is a Russian writer and journalist. Currently lives in the USA. Ruben Gallego is the son of a Venezuelan man and a Spanish woman. His grandfather was the General Secretary Gallego Gonzalez, Ruben - White on black

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I am a hero. It's easy to be a hero. If you don't have arms or legs, you are a hero. Or a dead man. If you don't have parents, rely on your own hands and feet. And be a hero. If you have neither arms nor legs, and you also managed to be born Gallego Ruben David Gonzalez - White on black

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The mother was separated from her son and was told he had died. Thirty years later he suddenly rose from the dead.

The plot rhymes with the throne, tyranny, the “iron mask” and the wells of oblivion.

But these are our places and times.

One of the stone bags, where a minor prisoner was kept, was called the Karl Marx Research Institute. With two active fingers, he is now entering his biography into the “black book” of international communism.

Black letters on a white ceiling, and at night white on black, bring to life, of course, special literature. Cherney Selina, the early Selah (who wrote his provincial freaks and fools from outside), Carver. Blacker than even Shalamov and others who returned and proclaimed the truth that for a writer, the worse, the better. This non-fiction arises outside the boundaries of “normal” horror, that which is creepy for normal, so to speak, people. Moreover, there is no look that was frozen once and for all in Kolyma, there is no cynicism, no special “pile up” of macabre (which, I remember, Tvardovsky credited to “Ivan Denisovich”). There is a keen interest in imputed life, there is compassion, love, naivety - there is awe and a living feeling. You call him on the phone in Madrid: “How are you?” The answer is always the same, like a password, like a symbol of faith: “Alive!” The Mundo newspaper wrote: “His forty-five kilograms are forty-five kilograms of optimism.” In “Arguments and Facts” the article about him is crazy, of course, but the title cannot be denied exactly: “Macho in a Wheelchair.” It is what it is. Our writer is no stranger to machismo. That's why he has such a name.

As experimental psychology shows, any human group, starting with a single family, tends to create an “enemy image” within itself. Unfortunately, this is where it began. In the large family of one of the leaders of the Spanish Communist Party, whose leadership fought against Francoism from Paris, the eldest daughter became the “black sheep”. Aurora emerged from the lyceum in the mid-60s so free-thinking that instead of the Sorbonne, the Leader sent her for “re-education” to Moscow, fortunately, the Spaniards, led by her senior comrade-in-arms and friend, Honorary President of the Party Dolores Ibarruri, fought there against Franco (see the novel by Sergei Yurjenen “Daughter of the General Secretary”, M., VneshSigma, 1999).

On the Lenin Hills, a Parisian Spaniard meets a Venezuelan student, a guerrilla from Caracas, who fled from the junta overseas - to the land of ideals. Wedding on the eighteenth floor of a Stalinist high-rise building. Pregnancy without proper control. The sudden discovery that there will be twins. While on his way to the Crimean vacation, the Leader is forced to set up a Kremlin hospital, which is politically not so easy in light of the brutal actions of Big Brother, who just at this moment decides to step on the “human face” of Czechoslovak socialism with his tarpaulin boot. Further - worse. Ten days after giving birth, one twin dies, the other is given a terrible diagnosis - cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy.