FURTIVOS by Vicente Paredes

In Furtivos, Vicente Paredes tells about those behaviours that are written into our own DNA. Even in the absence of earth, a dog will always try to bury his bone; even when walking over subway tunnels, cement and glass, a man will dig holes through them to plant seeds. 

 

When Bilbao became an industrial city, thousands of people came swarming in from the countryside of Galicia and Extremadura looking for jobs in factories. From one day to the next they had to metamorphose into an urban working class, but a mandate had been written in fire within their souls generations before: thou shalt plough the soil, thou shalt water it and ward off weeds. They were country people, just like those who lived here: the only difference being that they couldn´t take their land along with them.

 

Precarious squatters, inhabitants of the grey zone, shut away into reserves like natives, they soon learnt what the key to survival was: never to be detected.