The Eyes of Aldapuerta!

In 1996, underground UK publisher Headpress released a rather mysterious collection of short stories entitled The Eyes: Emetic Fables from the Andalusian de Sade. This was reported to be the work of one Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta, and his biography (as it appears in the book, written by translator Lucia Teodora) is worth quoting from:

"Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta was born in the southern Spanish city of Seville circa 1950 and died by suicide in Madrid in 1987, burning himself to death in a small room on whose rent he was nearly three months in arrears. He is known to have spent much of his life outside Spain, in Central and South America and the Philippines; what precisely he did there remains uncertain, and confirmation or refutation of the many rumours, variously unsavoury and contradictory, that circulated during his lifetime will have to wait for the complete decipherment of his coded diaries."

If you're thinking this all sounds a little too good to be true, I'm inclined to agree; this character is simply too well-drawn, a teen who turned tricks with a sleazy bookstore proprietor in exchange for books? Who spent equal time in jail for theft & drug offenses as he did at medical school ("where he learned the geography of the human body and something of its almost infinite capacity for suffering and degradation")?

Aldapuerta eats a foreskin from work and gets caught trying to smuggle a couple of human hands across the border. By 1987 he's looking on his last leg, possibly due to AIDS, and soon thereafter he burns to death in his bed.

Was it suicide? Drug dealers mad about not being paid? "A murderous vendetta carried out by right-wing religious vigilantes outraged by his blasphemous writings and life-style"? If there's one thing for sure about this Aldapuerta, it's that mystery & intrigue follow him at every turn - and then never so much as in the hotbed of intriguing mystery that was his 'apparent death' (apparent because the charred corpse may not even have been his, so the story goes).


Was this Andalusian de Sade really a put-on? It's been suggested the writer may have actually been British poet Jeremy Reed. Whoever wrote this stuff, it's pretty hardcore - that next level of grim human horror. There's even a found glossary in the back of a language, "highly suitable for the composition of ultra-violent sadistic pornography".

And lo, I did discover recently that a chap named Alex transcribed the whole thing and put it online, so that others who never bought a copy might read these scandalous, dizzyingly violent tales and decide for themselves. Thank you, Andrew.

The Eyes - Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta