.

CONTRA LA VIOLENCIA DE GÉNERO 016
AGAINST THE VIOLENCE OF GENRE 016

NO TE LO PREGUNTES, HAZLO ¡ YA !
DON'T ASK IT, DO IT: ALREADY!

AYUDA AL NIÑ@ Y ADOLESCENTE
116111 y al 900202010

IT HELPS THE CHILD AND THE TEENAGER
116111 and 900202010

.

.
A la venta en EL Corte Inglés, FNAC, Casa del libro, ALEJANDRÍA y librerías, SOLICÍTALOS.
EnglishFrenchGermanSpainItalianDutchRussianPortugueseJapaneseKoreanArabicChinese Simplified

READING/FirstChapter/FROM SHADOW TO LIGHT IN ENGLISH




FROM SHADOW TO LIGHT. ‘A secret and a love greater than life itself.’

This story begins in a very distant time, four
centuries ago, when lives were quite different. This story is about one of those lives. Existence was
determined by the magic spells of strange people who foretold the future, for better or worse, for the newly born. This is how Isabel’s life was meant to be.

PROLOGUE

This story takes place in a city, a city which I love as much as I love Gijón (Spain), with its large houses, its granaries, its green fields, its sky and its climate.

Isabel, the main character of this story, is a young, elegant, pale woman, with big eyes as black as night and copper brown hair. She has an agreeable countenance, and is slim and attractive.
She is a modern woman for her time; a fighter for equality regardless of religion, skin colour or sexual preference.

She was born in the middle of the 20th century to middle class parents. She received a refined education, and has a mind between the cerebral and keen, and the subliminal. She is single, with several relationships behind her, none of which left much of a mark on her. She had a yearning, a feeling that there was something more to life, to her life, that there must be something more in store for her. Because of this, the events which occurred, and the anxiety of her mind through long searching, this story will be based on her glorious dream.

CHAPTER ONE
LIFE


Politically and socially speaking, things were stable, but we continued to live in an unmistakably chauvinistic society, with the same age-old prejudices that in former times would have resulted in the killing of anyone that found himself, how shall I say, outside of conventional customs.

Although I grew up in an environment with rules which were considered socially acceptable, I always knew, deep down, that equality began with being equal in the mind, and recognising that equals are capable of going hand in hand regardless of the outer exterior to which we are born.
For this reason I was never what you would call a normal girl. I never liked playing house like my friends did. I never wanted Prince Charming to rescue me from the tower so I could live happily ever after.

I never saw myself as a weak, fragile woman who needed the strong, protective arms of a man. Not that I didn't desire it on occasion. In short, l considered myself equal and therefore waited for a companion who would see life as I did. As I hit my thirties, my life continued to be guided by this way of thinking and I found myself riding the 'wave'as society evolved, but I knew we weren’t on the same frequency. I wasn't what you’d call a feminist, but I fought to foster the female point of view, and for the battle between the sexes to be left behind. I believed people should be free to express themselves without restriction, to be what they wanted to be sexually, not through being forced, or through obligation, coercion or, of course, violence. My friends said I was an idealist and that if the world were to be like that, it wasn't going to be me who changed it.

I always responded in the same way: ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.
Was I an idealist as my friends said? No. Completely the opposite. It was just that that was the kind of world I wanted to live in. So my life continued. My days were spent trying to be myself, and trying not to die trying. Fighting to fill the void I felt deep within.

I had always known, of course, that life and death coexisted, just like good and evil, both hanging by a thread. That one can live and die in the mind without the body suffering any alteration.

I lived alone in my little flat in Gijón: the city that watched as I was born and watched as destiny snatched my family from me too soon. In the dawn of my adolescence I stayed in the care of my paternal aunt Teresa (a natural feminist). It was largely she who encouraged in me the fight for equality between the sexes, equality between a man and a woman, at least as far as intellect is concerned.

All these events made of me a woman subject to my will, my free will, and naturally, to the power that a mind in a continuous state of evolutionary criticism offered, and a rational sense of things.

Without a male role model, I believed more in myself, and I strived to make my thoughts capable of making my wishes and my ideas materialise. In short, not just to become equal to the opposite sex, but to improve myself. But my mind, as rigid as ever, left a tiny space for the spiritual, and from there sprang the great controversy that life had saved for me.