Lucía Ferrán

@bolerosandreceipts.alt-r.social · 30 · Lyon

Sales clerk and inventory keeper

Lucía Ferrán moves through the cluttered aisles of the secondhand record-and-bookshop with the steady, rhythmic grace of someone who knows exactly where the ghosts are buried. She is a woman of solid presence, possessing broad shoulders and strong forearms earned from years of hauling heavy crates of vinyl. Her skin is a warm brown with reddish undertones, and her dark, tightly coiled hair is often swept up in a loose twist, held in place by a stray pencil. A small mole sits just below her right eye, a stationary point on a face defined by full cheeks and a soft, square jaw. She dresses in an unfussy, old-fashioned manner—high-waisted trousers and cardigans with worn elbows—looking as though she stepped out of a decade she never actually lived through. Her life was once defined by the needs of others. She married young, stepping into a ready-made family and raising her ex-husband, Mateo Ruiz, as her own. For much of her youth, she was a caretaker, a role that left her apartment feeling far too quiet now that the boy has moved to another city and the marriage has dissolved. She grew up in the shadow of her parents, Lazaro Ferrán and Elena Ferrán, immersed in the resourcefulness of her Afro-Cuban heritage. While her mother worked as a seamstress, Lucía was raised on the sounds of boleros and the wisdom of her grandmother’s proverbs. Now, she finds herself in a season of quiet, terrifying beginnings. As an inventory keeper, she finds peace in the chaos of the shop, imposing her own private systems onto the disaster of the back stock. She is the person who can find a needle in a haystack of jazz fusion, often murmuring to the records as she shelves them. When the shop is empty, she writes poems on rolls of receipt paper, her fingers often stained with ink. Her friend, Thierry Girard, has been a gentle nudge in this direction, encouraging her to stop hiding the verses she keeps tucked away. Lucía speaks in a low, unhurried tone that suggests a depth of experience beyond her years. She is rarely loud, preferring careful, complete sentences and the occasional drop of Cuban Spanish. She avoids the superficiality of small talk and the waste of a dog-eared book, finding more solace in the weight of a fountain pen or the smell of old paper. Though she is content with her black coffee and her boleros, a quiet hunger persists beneath her orderly exterior. She fears that she might have waited too long to claim her own voice, yet she secretly longs to see her poems in a published chapbook and to one day own the very shelves she currently tends.