Unlike the rest of the men in his village, Mario decides not to spend his life as an ordinary fisherman, so he decides, using his bicycle, to work as a postman in a small village, even though it only has one person who receives and sends letters. Chile's greatest poet, Pablo Neruda.
In his exile there, the poet lives as an observer and participant in the great changes taking place in Chile, and through small meetings and discussions about love, poetry and politics, a special relationship is established between him and the young postman who is immersed in love and enchanted by Neruda’s poetry, which he sees as his right because poetry does not belong to its writer but to those who need it. .
Through charming details of the human relations in a small village between the poet steeped in politics and the postman in love steeped in poetry, Scarmeta recounts the great political changes that took place in Chile and the rise and fall of revolutionary dreams.
Salman visits the dead cities to make a documentary film about them, those cities that were symbols of ancient civilizations, before they became cities of broken columns and stone remains. But he finds there, in the house of one of the city's elders, a painting of a wounded deer, signed by his mother, "Fatima." Soon, the owner of the house presents him with possible scenarios for his film, all of which revolve around “Fatima,” and he finds himself entering a magical world and a confusing maze as he spies on the hidden faces of his mother, realizing that he only knew one face of her.
In this novel, Khairy Al-Dhahabi manipulates times and multiple voices to write about dead cities and Fatima with its many mirrors. Who is she? What is its truth? What is the secret of wishing? “If her name wasn’t Fatima”?
