Nostalgy follows a man who returns to the landscapes and memories that shaped his life, searching for meaning in the quiet spaces between past and present. As he revisits old relationships, unresolved emotions, and the moments that once defined him, he confronts the distance between who he was and who he has become. Through a delicate blend of introspection, atmosphere, and emotional depth, the novel explores how memory can both illuminate and distort, and how the act of looking back can transform the way we move forward.
Nostalgy follows a man who returns to the landscapes and memories that shaped his life, searching for meaning in the quiet spaces between past and present. As he revisits old relationships, unresolved emotions, and the moments that once defined him, he confronts the distance between who he was and who he has become. Through a delicate blend of introspection, atmosphere, and emotional depth, the novel explores how memory can both illuminate and distort, and how the act of looking back can transform the way we move forward.
NOSTALGY
CHAPTER I
Three years after his transfer to the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles, Alejandro was promoted to a senior position on the Board of Directors, becoming the only foreigner and the youngest of the vice presidents. On the very day he was informed of his promotion, he feigned an illness to leave work earlier than usual, absorbed in the melancholy of his thoughts.
As soon as he left the center of the sprawling city, he headed north, following the winding road that skirted the ocean. To his left, the Pacific coast dissolved into the reddish hue of twilight, radiating powerfully from the colossal globe of fire that sank slowly into the indistinct edge of the sea, extinguishing daylight in a burst of nocturnal colors.
Without lifting his gaze from the pale concrete pavement, he let the violet outlines of the clouds drift before his eyes, unable to let the magnificent spectacle of nature’s lights dispel the bitterness of his emotions. On the contrary, the death of the day once again invaded him with the irresistible lethargy that smothered his admiration for the beauty of those brief, static minutes it took the fiery disc to vanish.
In the growing dusk along the beaches, he thought he saw couples walking, joined at the waist, their skins damp, shining with sweat and roughened by the harshness of the salty breeze. He fancied he could taste the dryness of lips, salty and burning, the accelerated beating of hearts that drowned out the murmur of the white-crested waves breaking into the incipient darkness. And he felt transported to another time, on another southern shore, a summer of his youth, barefoot on the soaked sand of an endless coast, hand in hand with that woman whose name he no longer remembered.
Very near them, the sea had turned into a rippling mirror rising from the darkness, and in the small crests lifted by the breeze shimmered the silver edge of the immense moon’s rays that bathed their faces. They sat far from the water, half-hidden among the tiny dunes covered with coarse vegetation, and he unclasped her top, and the moon revealed the whiteness of breasts of salt and sand. Awkwardly, he ran his fingers over the hardened nipples and felt the brief tremors of the girl’s body, rolling over the minuscule grains of sand that clung to her wet skin, drenched in the perfume of womanhood.
The wind struck the back of his neck with pleasant violence, carrying the distant roar of the engine, the heart of that machine that so thrilled him. He switched on the headlights, always moving away from that other infinity of lights in the city of Los Angeles, where his mischievous destiny had led him. He turned off the radio and listened to the sadness of those last instants of beauty, when the sea mist becomes an imaginary mountain range, a frontier between the world of dying light and the night being born.
He soon arrived at the house he had rented in Santa Monica, on the slope of a hill overlooking the sea, where he had found his refuge apart from the city’s noise and far from work—a spacious white‑walled townhouse sheltered within the fenced grounds of the condominium.
At the entrance, beside the private guard, he did not even notice that ridiculous sign which had made him laugh so much the first time he saw it, propped against the lower part of the entry wall: a rectangle of immaculate white paint with carefully drawn red letters in two languages. At the top, in English:
WARNING
PRIVATE PROPERTY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT
And immediately below, in Spanish:
PELIGRO
PROPIEDAD PRIVADA
VIOLADORES SERAN DISPARADOS
He passed under the jealous gaze of the private policeman, the watchman on duty from the security company whose services the residents paid for collectively, satisfied to enjoy a measure of protection that the official forces of order could not guarantee. Despite the uniform loaded with gaudy emblems, the golden badge with his surname, the dark Ray‑Ban lenses, the baton and the .38‑caliber pistol, and the professional look of intimidation, those guards had no more right to detain a supposed criminal than any other resident of the community.
For Alejandro, their presence meant no more than the sound of a fountain’s water on a scorching Andalusian afternoon, which makes us feel an imaginary coolness, or the fûrin, the wind chimes that hang at the doors of Japanese houses so that their inhabitants may sense the false freshness evoked by the tinkling of the tiny clapper trembling in the breeze.
He tossed his jacket onto the back of the glossy black leather sofa and set his briefcase beside the living‑room table, heading toward the aluminum sliding door of the balcony to let in the night air that would erase the cold smell of the air conditioner. He switched on the television, muted the sound, and started the open‑reel tape recorder that filled the silence of the house with music.
He opened the door of the gigantic double‑door refrigerator, poured himself a glass of fresh lemonade, and prepared a plate of tropical fruits, cutting them into pieces and mixing them with slices of melon, watermelon, papaya, and avocado. He ate voraciously, accompanying the bites with crab legs and shrimp.
Like the Americans, he was still not fully aware of the small amounts of poison added to food there to improve its appearance and delay its decay, as he had discovered with the lemons, which, even fifteen days after being cut, retained a freshness as if they were new.
When he finished eating, he lay back in a chair on the balcony and once again let his gaze lose itself in the immensity of points of light reflected on the invisible waves. The moon was a slit attempting to open the sky, without succeeding in illuminating the beaches or reflecting on the sea below, a pit of darkness that absorbed its light.
He smiled as he recalled the incident that afternoon with a highway policeman who had stopped him for exceeding the ridiculous speed limit. It was not the fine that bothered him, but the failure of the radar detector he had bought for more than three hundred dollars, defeated by the police’s instant‑trigger gun. As a kind of revenge, he had answered the officer with disdain, filling his words with mockery as he told him he was not in a hurry, only eager to dry the car he had just washed -a remark the officer took as a joke.
After work, he liked to drive north along the highway toward Malibu, returning later with the sunset at his right, playing with the radar traps of the highway police on any of the crowded freeways that carried him far, across deserts, housing developments, and hills. But the game had begun to weary him, and he no longer found satisfaction in racing with the convertible, nor in accepting the challenges of other fast cars to see who reached the next traffic light first. With the same weariness, he declined invitations to those parties where marijuana was smoked or cocaine sniffed, unable to understand why people insisted on spending fortunes to buy—or, as some clever ones did, to cultivate up to seven annual harvests of marijuana in hydroponic greenhouses equipped with special projectors kept lit day and night—to stimulate themselves with those artificial sensations provided by narcotics.
Since he no longer smoked and drank little alcohol, except for an occasional beer and the fine aged wines of his homeland, he felt a strong repulsion toward those unable to follow his discipline, his rejection of narcotics, his concern for physical and mental health. Over time, he had once again withdrawn, taking refuge in the solitude of his house, his car, his memories.
But the worst was the lack of interest he had begun to feel in his work, which forced him to look repeatedly at the clocks, waiting for the hour to leave the office and rush into his races against the police, unable to make up excuses to leave earlier than the others.
He set his glass on the balcony table, stood up, and rested his hands on the railing. In Palisades Park, stretching along the coast and separating the fortress of houses from the sea with its thick palms, under the intermittent light of a lamp, a vagabond prepared his bed of cardboard and forgotten newspapers, his empty pockets holding all his possessions, in that world of the wealthy who gazed at the sea seeking an answer to what they were incapable of asking.
He returned inside and sat in front of the television, playing with the remote control, his gaze lost in the images that barely appeared, indifferent to whatever was reflected in his eyes. He switched the set off again, rose, and stepped back onto the balcony.
The sky had lost every trace of light, becoming an opaque immensity in which the city’s glow was swallowed. He lowered his gaze to follow the red lights of a car disappearing into the distance, pursued by a trail of fiery wakes.
He began to think of something to do to distract himself, some activity that might excite him and lift him from his weariness, but everything left him with a bitter taste of boredom. He no longer listened to music with feeling, and it no longer stirred the same emotions.
He had no desire to go to the golf club, a game that did not amuse him, nor to play tennis, and much less to enter the gym, where he loathed the company of mannish, muscular women practicing aerobics, and of effeminate men with wiry bodies and tight synthetic pants, repeating their movements with weights hundreds of times without taking their eyes off the mirrors—all that cult of the body.
It had also been a long time since he had gone to any show, or to concerts or baseball or basketball games that he had so enjoyed during his first year in California, when everything had seemed beautiful, different, and entertaining.
His eyes wandered over the shelves filled with records and only a few books that had been given to him, besides the piles of automobile magazines—his only reading apart from work documents. He noticed the photographs of Denise on the mantels, her delicious smile on lips like petals of exotic Oriental flowers after the rain, the warm tone of her skin and her strangely slanted eyes, the fine jet‑black hair falling below her delicate ears—and he felt no emotion at all.
Living always apart from others, his self‑sufficiency sometimes made him feel like a god, but with time, far from family and friends, he understood that his life was a failure as a person, that his soul shrank at hearing only the bitter echoes of his own heart, and he tried to deny the reality of his spirit, which cried out for the presence of that woman at his side. He found himself in constant struggle with himself, without realizing that it was his fear of life that condemned him to solitude.
It had been more than two months since he had seen her, and he thought he did not miss her either. Something was missing in his life, he told himself, and he was unable to define that something—only that horrible sensation of emptiness, of weariness and boredom.
“Tomorrow I will speak with the boss,” he told himself. “This cannot go on.”
Spoilers: Nostalgia is a difficult psychological trap to fall into. It captures memories with a positive filter. It emphasizes good times and down plays sadness. It ignores that those good times weren't shared by everyone. It changes pop culture touchstones from irritating fads and sources of cringe to gold standards beyond criticism.
Nostalgia forces people to idealize and live in the past and ignore the present in front of them. It creates a false past that has more to do with pop culture and filtered memories than reality. This trap can be found in Miguel Vandenburgh’s novel, Nostalgy.
Alejandro is a businessman who emigrated from his native Spain to Los Angeles and is on a fast track to professional success and personal misery. He hates the commute, hates this overwhelmingly loud American city, and while he is good at his job, he lacks the passion or interest in it. His thoughts often drift to old friends, past loves, and youthful adventures to the point that he can barely function at work or at home. His boss notices his depressed behavior and grants him a sabbatical. Alejandro takes the opportunity to fly back to Spain and visit his childhood home, family, old friends, and lost loves. Maybe he can find the boy that he used to be.
Nostalgy is not concerned with what it's about or who it's about but it is concerned with how it feels. Alejandro’s journey captures the mind and emotions with thoughtful evocative passages and situations that challenge the concepts of memory and reality.
In Los Angeles, Alejandro is in a constant state of stasis and inertia. Alejandro lives in the present but his mind is elsewhere. He has a good job, lives in a nice neighborhood, has friends and romantic relationships but it's all surface. He contributes to the bare minimum of his job, commute, and current friendships and relationships. Everyone else moves in the present, while he is mentally standing still in the past.
Everyone around him moves at great speed, lives in bright colors, and loudly proclaims their emotions. Alejandro lives in a world of muted grays, silence, lumbering movements, detachment, and no emotional connection.
When Alejandro returns to Spain is when he starts recognizing color and movement. He sees the blue skies and sun’s reflections, the other commuters and travelers, and the intense euphoria that one gets when they are beginning a quest. In Alejandro's case, it's a quest to come face to face with his past.
When Alejandro returns to his Spanish hometown, he sees that it has changed. He sees more people, different buildings, companies that have franchises there that didn't exist before. He is like many whose minds are captured by the hometown of their youth and expected it to remain the same.
They expect the landscape photographs in their mind to be unaltered but a real place isn't like a photograph. It can't and won't stay in one place forever. People move in, businesses create jobs, houses are built. The world cannot and will not remain stagnant no matter how much we want it to.
This also applies to people. Alejandro has a lovely reunion with a boyhood friend, Felix. The two walk around old haunts, live recklessly, play pranks and share intimate secrets about their past. It is like a grand adventure that is reborn decades after the last one they went on. The reunion gives Alejandro a brief moment of unbridled joy but it is only temporary.
For Alejandro the reunion with Felix is part of the goal, the answer to find out why he is stuck and whether he can find happiness. Felix however looks on it as a vacation or temporary reprieve. It's a stress reliever from his life as a single parent. He has fun then he returns.
It doesn't have the same emotional impact for him because life didn't stop for him. Felix worked, got with someone, fathered children, and now has adult responsibilities. Alejandro has them too but life stopped in his youth. He can't mentally separate the boy that he used to be from the man that he is. It's a sad existence for him to always look forward and not back.
He also finds that sadness in other places and people as well. His father, once a proud strong man, is now weakened and made vulnerable by the natural process of age. He reunites with an old girlfriend who is pleased to see him but sets him straight by asking what he expected when coming. Did he really think that she would stay the same age and have the same personality forever? She also corrects him on many of the details reminding him that his memories are imperfect and were less how they actually were than how he wanted to be.
Nostalgy is similar to the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance.” In it, a burned out executive (Gig Young) returns to his childhood home exactly as it was. He has traveled backwards in time and sees his younger self and his parents. When his younger self, he mournfully tells the boy that there won't be any cotton candy, merry go rounds, nor band concerts and no pleasant memories in adulthood. His father realizes that he is in the presence of his son as an adult. He tells him to go back to his old home and his real time. “There is only one summer per customer,” and to let his younger self have his. The most important crucial information that he tells him is to look around when he gets home. He might find cotton candy, merry go rounds, and band concerts. He just hasn't been looking hard enough.
When people live inside their nostalgia, they only recall the days of their youth with optimism and pleasure. They deify the music, shows, books, fashion, news, and movies of their past without really living within them. Mentally and emotionally they are frozen in that space.
Nostalgy suggests that there is nothing wrong with those memories or those items. They made us who we are and they serve as temporary time machines. However, we can become trapped in our past and close the present and future around us. That is what Alejandro shows, someone who can't move forward because he is frozen by facing backwards.
Living only in our youth causes us to miss the beauty and wonder around us now. A beautiful sunset. A song that speaks to us. A fictional character that says what we are thinking. A job that encourages our talent. Finding the perfect partner. The birth of a child. Our forever home and sacred space. The advances that have been made allow us to learn, live, and enjoy life on a larger scale. The voices are finally heard and listened to when they used to be forced to recede somewhere in the background. Even when things are at their hardest, there is always something to learn, enjoy, take pride in, experience, and love.
You can't go home to the past again but you can experience the world around you and find your own cotton candy, merry go rounds, and band concerts. It takes some time but Alejandro finds his.