«Cuerda imagines in Tiempo después a future reduced to a skyscraper (the White Towers) raised in the middle of the desert of reality. Abroad, the class struggle continues to enjoy as good health as from the moment someone knew how to name it. The codes that govern this microuniverse of civil guards, poetic barbers, exasperating janitors and some everlasting archetypes will be punctually destabilized by the revolutionary gesture of a lemonade vendor. Beneath the humor, the filmmaker's disenchantment with a world in free fall is palpable.”—Jordi Costa

«It had been many years since a jewel like Tiempo después had been published in humorous literature in Spanish; One of the usual ones has had to come to rescue us from the mediocrity of the habit.”—Edu Galán

"Some time later is poetry, a cultural event of the first order."—Arturo Valls

This short story, which is the first that he has published in book format, follows in the wake of his most celebrated works (Total, Dawn, which is not little, Así en el cielo como en la tierra, etc.).

*

As is known by now, the entire world has been reduced to a single building and a few suburbs. As it is. And the year 9177 has been reached so in fits and starts, that it is not a small thing that, at least three or four days a week, there are people alive in the world and the sun rises, even where it pleases.
Like a cheerful entomologist and a grumpy notary at the same time, José Luis Cuerda has collected —privileged— information on the facts and sayings of this world, with special attention to characters such as:
—José María, a proletarian, who will soon be forty. Robust and probably a virgin, he has a willful air, he pushes an ice cream cart and one would think when he saw him that he owes nothing to anyone;
“The king, his adversary, who has the unmistakable and transient air of being the adulterous son of an unhappy father-king; he bad-speaks languages with mixed accents and is entangling, tricky and wordy;
—and Méndez, the mayor's secretary and heroine of the story, is a very attractive and slutty girl, who seems to have been born, smiles, feeds herself, dresses and undresses on purpose.
The other characters, by the dozens, weave a warp, or human population, in a verifiable and bipolar world made up of those who boss it around: a couple from the World Civil Guard, three war sailors, some ecclesiastics, two barbers... and for those who they are hopelessly screwed: chronically unemployed, women, ethnic minorities...

[...] The sheep, already on the roof, begin to graze on the grass that surrounds the pool. Some girls, who are sunbathing lying on the ground, get up and go to the pastor.
"Are we in the way here?"
-No. No way. Animals are already looking for life.
"How beautiful your cattle are raised," she says, one to please.
—You are also very rich. Do you give milk?
The interlocutor blushes:
-Not yet.
—Hey. Well, in that, sheep are better. [...]