Home » Spain » Xita Rubert » Los hechos de Key Biscayne [The Facts About Key Biscayne
Xita Rubert: Los hechos de Key Biscayne [The Facts About Key Biscayne]
The narrator, an unnamed twelve year girl girl, warns us at the beginning that what she is about to tell us about what happened at Key Biscayne may not be entirely accurate. To remember is to change…I invent because I want to, because I need to. The desire to recount hides in me another desire: to substitute the real with the narrated, to change and and replace what happened.
The narrator, her father Ricardo and her brother Nico are flying from Boston to Miami. Apparently Ricardo has decided Boston is too cold in winter so, in the middle of the school year, he takes them out of school. Ricardo is something of an absent-minded professor. They arrive at the airport not with cases but with all their stuff in bin bags. The lady at the airport counter is bemused and even more bemused when Ricardo says that they forgot their cases. She is even further bemused when, on being asked for ID, Ricardo produces a tatty Spanish driving licence. She politely points out that it is in Spanish and has expired. Ricardo is a visiting professor in Boston so faxes are exchanged and they eventually get on the plane.
More problems in Miami. He sets off the metal detector, claiming he has an aluminium plate in his hip following a motorcycle accident. Their equipment cannot detect it. He offers the police money and is led away, the two children left with a woman the police think is their mother but is just a random woman they do not know. Eventually all is removed and after more complications with the taxi and car hire, they are off. It is hot, it is humid, it is Florida.
We are gradually learning what is going on in their family. It seems that Ricardo and his wife are separated and he has custody in term time but as his wife tells him when she phones him, custody does not mean yanking them out of school in the middle of the school year and carting them around the US. They were meant to stay in Boston with the children learning English and he teaching. Yet here they are in Florida where no-one lives unless they have something to hide. He rationalises his behaviour by saying our time on Earth is limited. Life is extremely short. I felt I was aging in the snow of Boston, surrounded by men with their noses buried in mountains of books. I prefer the sun.
Their first surprise in Key Biscayne is that they have to pass through three security gates to get into the community where they are to live. Initially they stay in a motel but when it is time to move to the apartment they are to stay in, they get another surprise. It is hot in Florida but Florida can and does have tropical storms so the road they drive down is not a road but a river.
They get there and soon the sun is back. They soon meet someone Ricardo knows. Ricardo climbs a coconut tree (he is seventy-one – the age difference is an issue – the author’s father was fifty-seven when she was born). We learn that he has taken up a position at the University of Miami.
The children remain bemused by their father’s behaviour, not least because they had been brought up mainly by their mother and close contact with their father tended to be limited to holidays. Nico is soon off on his own path but while our narrator does have something of a life separate from her father, she seems more affected.
It is not helped by her discovery that her father has a gun, which he waves about. She has to go school, of course, but her father has not got that arranged as she turns up without a uniform and is sent away. He has, however, met her teachers who, he says look like they have come straight from a Colombia soap opera and clearly have never heard of Cervantes. She makes two friends – a Haitian girl from a poorer background and an Italian girl from a richer background- Eleonora.
Her father, as we have seen, is not good at organisation and tends to leave everything to his secretary who is still based in Spain. His daughter comments that sI will remain surprised till the end of my days at the capacity of women to humiliate themselves for my father.
It is Eleonora introduces her to Omegle which she initially imagines to be some kind of pet but turns out to be an online chat system where they discover many things including a virtual infinity of penises.
However there are other discoveries. They had mainly been eating out but they discover the Winn-Dixie supermarket where they find a host of foods from sushi to junk food.
And then their mother arrives. She does not stay with them but at a nearby hotel but visits and, of course, argues a lot with Ricardo. She wants them to return to Spain as they have not seen their grandparents for a while but she eventually returns, though not before one or two adventures, particularity a visit to the nature reserve where Ricardo goes swimming in an area where it is expressly forbidden and where there may well be caymans. Mother leaves but then the police arrive, telling the father that he must not leave the area.
The novel is partially humorous with the erratic antics of the father, but mainly serious as our heroine struggles with fitting in -adapting to a strange country, with its culture which has many differences from Spain, new friends, a father who is eccentric and a brother who seems remote. She can and does hide away in plain sight by spending a fair amount of time on the sun lounger by the swimming pool. Does it change her? When do you cease to be what you are ? When do you see yourself as something else?. She analyses herself and the situation several times, questioning whether her life here was a series of chances or inevitable, whether she remembers correctly what happened, whether time was different here. It is an interesting account of how a twelve year old girl struggles with a different environment and how it affects her.
Publishing history
First published in 2024 by Anagrama
No English translation