It is against the background of this shared darkness where both the narrating “we” and the readers find themselves up to this point that the reader experiences intimately (interiorized in one’s own inner darkness) further the destinies which are developed cinematically through various episodes in the life of the spouses Maria and Raoul, the couples Sergio and Olga, Victor and Susana, of Andres, Lola, Pablo, Jesus, Silvia, Sonia, Eva. Somewhat surprisingly, after a while one concludes that only 13 names and persons are distinguished. In the uroboric labyrinth of the story, the person of “we” is in fact perceived as a monster with countless heads and intertwined extremities. Their indistinguishable nature in the darkness only helps multiply them into constantly new possibilities. Yet, it is from this position and from the very fact of being centered in this uroboric plane, where the reader intimately experiences everything in the dark, he or she can also intimately experience the brief and scattered episodes of the crisis moments in their lives – when one of them appears in the light of day. The reader follows them with the attention given to the stories of a next of kin. The reader is, after all, a witness to their most secret, intimate and mutually shared urge to reach through a series of trials and temptations the absolute of being beyond the boundaries of sexual, professional, marital or any other kind of identity which is imposed by the community. The utopia of the dark room lies in the possibility to be in it, and with or through another next to you to be yourself with oneself. The dark room is a heuristically revealed and then by a vow of secrecy defended space, a place against which the “fall in the life of the community” of each of the characters is measured. In fact, it’s not even certain whether the 13 personified characters are the only one participating in the sacred space of the darkness. The We might also be many more others. In the end, it might be all of us.
We is the only mode of narrative expression, which is why “we” is the main, collective and not quite definable and all-encompassing protagonist of the story. “We” is anyone who is unambiguously, without reservation or qualifications, without identity boundaries of any kind, part of “we”. Through this very centeredness in this “we”, we follow the episodes telling the rise and fall on the social, private and intimate plan of the personified characters in the story from their student days, through the sunset of their youth and during a period of 15 years all the way to their middle age. The oldest person in their company is the activist Silvia, a single mother of a nine-year-old son in her forties, who shall appear as a character in the second half of the novel and whose activism together with that of the hacker Jesus, will ultimately jeopardize the safety of this secret place, which at times serves as a sanctuary, and at other times as a hiding place – depending on the existential, social or intimate drama which each of the characters go through at a given moment.
The macro-temporal periods of this shared time that takes place behind the dark curtains and walls, as it was already stated, are narrated through a film screening of the sequences. For example, the ascent up the social ladder of the characters of the multi-headed “we” is seen as a synecdochal, animated representation of the spreading of houses, raising of roofs, opening of balconies and vistas of lawns and pools. Always in the collective plural. This is also repeated in the animated cinematic description of the period of the fall, the time of recession in Spain, the credit default and the activation of the mortgages – the walls of the houses squeezing in, pools disappearing, luxury holidays, mandatory weekends out of town when a two-bedroom apartments are exchanged for studios, as well as the businessman’s office with wandering in the recesses of little towns.