The life of José Almoina seems written in advance for a novel. Born in Lugo in 1903, a postal clerk and an intellectual educated in the humanities, Almoina went into exile after the Civil War with his wife, Pilar Fidalgo, and their children. After a stint in France, he settled in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, one of the longest-lasting and bloodiest dictators of twentieth-century America. There he worked as a professor, served as tutor to the dictator’s son, and rose to become Trujillo’s private secretary. On May 4, 1960 he was deliberately run down in Mexico City and shot by two hitmen; he died the following day.
Selena Millares
(Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1963) makes that life the centerpiece of
Al calor de tu nombre
(Plaza & Janés, 2026), a novel of more than five hundred pages that traverses three decades of wars, dictatorships, flights, and conspiracies. The starting point, however, lies almost at the end of the story.
Almoina lies on the street after receiving the shots. He hears voices, feels himself bleeding, tries to understand what is happening, and recognizes the green Chevrolet that had been following him for some time. From that wounded consciousness arise his mother, his wife, his children, and scenes from the past. Death opens the book and memory immediately begins to dispute the ground with him. It is an opening of enormous efficacy: in just a few pages, Millares condenses an entire life into Almoina’s body.
The decision is significant because it immediately eliminates one of the most evident possibilities: the suspense about Almoina’s fate. We know where he ends up; what matters is to discover how he got there. After the attempted assassination, the narrative rewinds to Spain in 1929 and reconstructs his trajectory almost chronologically, before returning to May 1960. The circular structure gives unity to a long tale spread across two continents.
In that journey lies much of the mid-twentieth-century political history. Almoina flees first from Francoist repression and then from a Europe that careens toward another war. The Dominican Republic initially seems a refuge, but soon proves to be another captivity. Mexico does not put an end to the harassment either. The disappearance in 1956 of Jesús de Galíndez — Basque exile and critic of the Dominican dictator — also serves as a warning of what could happen to anyone who challenges the Trujillo regime. Millares deftly handles a broad historical framework: Spain, France, the Caribbean, and Mexico mark distinct stages as the persecution continues. The author ensures that this itinerary does not scatter the narrative, because each new geography poses a variation of the same question: how much to concede, to hide, or to feign in order to stay alive.
Millares had enough material to have built a political intrigue novel, and some passages work with genuine nerve. But the book gains depth by exploring the transformation of a man forced to change country, occupation, loyalties, and even public identity. That rift even reaches her own body of work: A Satrapy in the Caribbean appeared under a pseudonym as a denunciation of the regime; a year later she also published I Was Trujillo’s Secretary, in which she justified the dictator’s policies.
One of the author’s greatest achievements is showing, through Pilar, the familial cost of that persecution. Her presence prevents the story from being reduced to the protagonist’s exploits. She argues with her husband, suspects what he hides from her, worries about the children, and organizes travel. In some of the best passages, politics takes up residence in domestic life: an absence, a move, the fear of someone knocking at the door. When Almoina dies, the narrative returns to Pilar: to the hospital, to conflicting news, to the attempt to stay calm.
There is a recognizable trait of Millares, a poet as well as a narrator: the will to make ideas enter the story through images. Exile is cold, rain, provisional rooms, trains, ships, and suitcases. In France, distance is a wound that must be sewn with words. On the pages of the assassination, the syntax shortens, questions pile up, and perception fragments: blood, voices, the sound of the ambulance, Pilar’s hand, a dead mother who returns to speak to him. The writer works in third person and present tense, very close to Almoina’s consciousness. That proximity allows the text to move naturally from the sensory to the memory, from physical tension to reflection.
Literature also does not serve an ornamental function. The protagonist translates, writes, and recalls verses. Tiresias, Goya, or Fray Juan de Zumárraga appear linked to his intellectual activity. Books organize a life marked by instability and give it continuity: countries change, but reading and writing remain. There is something beautiful in a man hunted for half a lifetime continuing to think, as the net tightens, of a Homer edition he still wants to finish.
The figure of Trujillo places the novel within a long literary tradition concerning dictatorial power in Latin America, from Miguel Ángel Asturias to Roa Bastos and García Márquez. In terms of historical and thematic proximity, two works seem especially relevant: Galíndez, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, in which the Spanish exile is also trapped in the machinery of the Dominican regime, and The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa, perhaps the contemporary work that has most powerfully fixed the moral atmosphere of those years on the island. The reference that feels closest to me is In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Álvarez, which recovers the Mirabal sisters, symbols of opposition to Trujillo, from family affection.
The abundance of documentation makes conversations sometimes accumulate explanations. The author is more convincing when the research is integrated into the action: surveillance, a discussion, a meeting with Trujillo, the fear provoked by a car that reappears.
Al calor de tu nombre has the breadth of a biography, the tension of a pursuit, and the closeness of a family story. Its greatest virtue perhaps lies in the way those three dimensions feed into each other. Millares returns Almoina to life before returning him to history: she makes him walk, hide, translate, love, deceive, fear, and write; she also shows how his decisions affect those around him. That is why, when the narrative returns to the street in Mexico City where it began, we know the ending from hundreds of pages earlier, and yet it no longer means the same. The shots are the same, but the man who falls beneath them has changed completely.
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Author: Selena Millares. Title: Al calor de tu nombre. Publisher: Plaza & Janés. Availability: All of her books.