Néstor Doreste Padilla: "Women are increasingly present in my stories"

This story aroused the interest of our author, "and now I am writing about a group of immigrants from an invented continent, who are neither black nor white, and who go to a village pretending to be from the extreme right" and that is how far he is willing to tell Nestor Doreste.

The author of the Biography of Titian, another of his works, which he presented in November last year, recalls that, in this case, “the inspiration was in a reading of a biography of this Italian painter, when he was twelve years old. I started looking for prints of his paintings and I was captivated ».

Years later, the author had read many different biographies of this painter and «I decided to make one with the addition of all those details that had been left out of these publications, including a fictitious gathering with the characters of the time that surrounded Titian».

Supported by his whole family and encouraged by one of his grandchildren, Néstor Doreste began this journey as a writer capturing his childhood experiences on La Laja Beach, which "in those years was a well-known beach but quite on the outskirts of the city. and there we met several families and we spent the summers all the children together».

This official, retired since 2005, assures that "when I start writing, there is another Nestor who expresses himself within me" and acknowledges that "there is a very marked female influence, it must be that I had a mother with a lot of character and that had a great impact on my lifetime. In La Laja », he continues, « the men went to work and the children stayed all day with our mothers and with the rest of the women in the family, so their influence was very significant ».

two pillars

Doreste confesses to being an admirer of the figure of women, "she is far superior to men", and assures that the other pillar that has always marked her life is "the sea, I cannot live without it, I miss it like the air".

At the presentation of his latest book, Doreste explained that «I wanted to put into practice a wish I had kept for many years. As a child, the French writer Alexandre Duma sparked my interest in the life of the extraordinary Venetian Renaissance painter, Tiziano Vecellio, when I read his book three teachers, from the Austral collection. The intense narrative of Dumas and his special magic to tell anecdotes", explained Doreste, "made me feel a feeling of admiration for the painter grow in me, as my enthusiasm increased as I read the magnificent text of the author of The Three Musketeers and how he felt that he lived with the master in the restless Venetian atmosphere of the time».

After having read several biographies of other authors, Doreste states that "I realized that not everyone agreed on the data about his personal life, not about his work, and that made me think that the time had come to fulfill that secret wish" , tried to clarify those differences and, as a consequence of all this and almost sixty years, "that long-retained desire" came to light in book form.

With an energy difficult to imagine in a person over eighty years old, Néstor Doreste does not seem to have finished with the desire to continue in the gap and give another joy to his readers and his family with a new novel.

"In which I am immersed now," he explains, "I have even included a murder," he advances. He never tires of repeating how enthusiastic he is about dedicating himself, on his retirement, "to bring out again that other facet of my way of being."

«I am already beginning to notice certain elements that are repeated in my writing, such as the leading role of women, which at first was more residual but now is very present in all my stories, I can never leave them behind».