Un centímetro te falta

Synopsis

In the summer of 1993, Tomás turns eight in Calaire, the Mediterranean village where his family has always spent their summers: a place split in two by an enormous rock the locals call the Wall and which the eccentric Old Captain prefers to call the Door, because it separates two worlds that swap places depending on the wind — Calma, where the sea lies flat as a plate, and Alboroto, where the waves sweep everything away.

Alongside Nuria, his friend from every summer, Tomás chases crabs, steals croquetas from the harbour waiter, blackmails his teenage cousin and rescues an injured seagull he nurses as though something much larger depends on it. The afternoons pass in family games of parchís, village fairs, cardboard haunted houses and secret visits to an abandoned bus where the Old Captain lives — a man who rolls his own cigarettes, quotes books chewed by insects and teaches Tomás that there are as many ways of seeing the world as questions one is willing to ask.

But gradually something begins to crack the happy routine of summer. Mamá, always the first to run into the sea, now spends her mornings behind half-closed shutters. Papá comes and goes from the city without explanation. Adult conversations stop dead the moment Tomás walks into a room, and the doors that were always open in Calaire have started to close. The boy does not yet have the words for what is happening, but he has an instinct: to draw close to his mother, sing her the lullaby she used to sing to him, learn to care for her the way you care for a seagull with a broken wing, or a plant that only needs watering from a bed.

The phrase that gives the novel its title — «un centímetro te falta» — runs through the book like a refrain: it is what his mother says when he cannot quite reach the kitchen tap, what Tomás repeats whenever the world resists him, and also, without his fully knowing it, the exact measure of the distance between childhood and what he cannot yet name.

The symbolic climax comes when the Old Captain, honouring an old promise, leads Tomás up to the top of the Door — a place from which, he says, you can see Calma and Alboroto at once, past and future, every life one lives without knowing it. From up there, Tomás watches his whole summer unfold before him like a map: the happy days already gone and those that may yet come.

«Un centímetro te falta» is a novel about the precise moment a child begins to sense the fragility of those he loves, about the silences that fill a house when no one dares speak the truth aloud, and about the strange way love — even in the face of loss — always finds a lullaby to sing. It is also the fiction debut of musician Quique Gallo, who had already explored grief through song, and who here builds, with the same emotional honesty, a summer that is impossible to forget.

Machine translation, pending review.