Nuestra pluma

Synopsis

In September 2025, Matías Vesper—known in the literary world only by his pen name, Alain Fox, author of successful horror novels—returns to the city where he was born after twenty years away. In his bag he carries two things: an urn containing the ashes of Rita, a video-shop owner who was, in every sense that matters, his mother; and a fountain pen he stole two decades ago from someone else's desk, an object he still cannot decide whether to keep or destroy. On the evening of his arrival, an impulse draws him to a gay sauna where he thinks he recognises, through the steam, a face that should no longer look so young. The following day, chance brings him face to face with Julen Alba—his school companion and first, never-declared love, now a tattooist. The reunion opens something Matías believed sealed, and pushes him to do what he has never done: write, without hiding behind a pseudonym, the true story of what happened to him at fourteen.

That story—which the reader follows in alternating chapters narrated from 2005 and 2006—tells how an adolescent Matías, bullied at school for being gay, found shelter in Rita's video shop and in a shy, luminous friendship with Julen, the new boy with turquoise eyes. It also tells how, looking for company in the chatrooms of the time, he met Miro Mallen, a supposed thirty-four-year-old screenwriter who earned his trust by pretending to teach him to 'act' his way out of being a victim, and who used those scripts—written out, literally, in fountain pen—to manipulate him into abuse.

As Matías's novel takes shape, his relationship with Julen deepens in the present: visits to an art exhibition, a beach trip cut short by a providential breakdown, a night of confessions in the tattoo studio where Julen has kept, for twenty years, the first letter Matías ever wrote him. But just as the two of them are about to cross into real intimacy, the ghost of Miro Mallen—now a credited name in a film's closing titles—breaks through again, and Matías flees once more, still unable to separate desire from fear.

Resolution arrives in the form of two letters that cross in the post: Matías's, saying goodbye to Julen while he returns to settle unfinished business with his publisher and with himself; and Julen's, which discloses a truth that reframes everything that has come before—he too was a victim of Miro Mallen, years after Matías left, and has carried in secret a depression and suicidal ideation that Matías's novel, without knowing it, has finally put into words.

Nuestra pluma is a novel about online grooming told from the inside, about the way abuse rewrites masculinity and desire, and about the possibility—fragile, demanding, but real—of loving after harm. It is also, in its structure, a tribute to the power of fiction to say what life does not permit: a chapter narrated through the eyes of a cat, two teenagers who fold their letters into flowers, and an ending that promises not a cure, but a beginning.

Machine translation, pending review.