In this fabulous novel, Francisco Rivas tells us the story of Ricaventura, a mythical town in the Atacama Desert, from when it was discovered by the Adelantado Don Diego de Almagro, in 1535, until it collapsed when the Germans learned to obtain saltpeter from the air. in the second decade of the 20th century.
Before beginning the story, the reader encounters “The Men of Nitrate,” verses from Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, which are well worth remembering:
“I was in the saltpeter / with the dark heroes, / with which he digs fertilizing and fine snow / into the hard crust of the planet, / and I proudly shook their earthen hands. /
They told me: “Look, brother, how we live, / here in “Humberstone”, here in “Mapocho”, / in “Ricaventura”, / in “Paloma”, / in “Pan de Azúcar”, in “Piojillo”. /
And they showed me their rations / of miserable food, / their dirt floors in their houses, / the sun, the dust, the vinchucas, / and the immense loneliness.”
The novel, in reality, is a song that narrates the lives of those forgotten men who populated that inhospitable land and gave Chile the wealth it enjoyed in its first years of independent life, going through the vicissitudes of the Pacific War and of the distant First World War, when the European powers disputed the nitrate that they scraped from the desert salt.
The four centuries that pass while the story of Ricaventura unfolds fly by and the reader wishes they would never end. The novel has the charm of those old adventure books that delighted us in adolescence, when we looked into incredible lives that we would have gladly exchanged for our own, which seemed opaque and tasteless to us next to the one that shone in block letters before our eyes. eyes.
To the merit of the author’s imagination must be added the richness of his prose. Especially the creative and unexpected adjectives he uses. Let’s see, as an example, how he presents the priest, named Ventura: “The parish of Ricaventura was too far away to change the priest every month, and since Ventura never asked for a transfer and no complaints were ever received from him, his name, caught to a pin, had capsized in the clay colors of the map of the archdiocese” (Page 27).
Ramón Gracia is called the protagonist of the novel. Numerous characters swarm around him, each with his own identity, who generate a fable world in which all human passions fit.
The novel is fabulous, I said at the beginning. That adjective can be understood in at least two senses and both fit, like a glove, to this book, which is one of the best written in Chile in the last fifty years. Its first edition dates back to 1987 and this new one, which we discussed, was necessary. It narrates pages of national history that do not appear in the official history, and do not believe that this is only because they tell us about characters created by the author’s laborious imagination, because Rivas also presents military and politicians, including deputies, senators , ministers and the President of the Republic himself, even when his name is not mentioned, a character that is not far from the reality of then and perhaps from closer times.
Diego de Almagro had left five palm trees and a bronze cross on his way through Ricaventura. “Plant crosses and you will reap Christians,” his confessor had advised him when saying goodbye to him on the peninsula (Page 11). And Christians from Europe also arrived to that distant place, who were going to play transcendent roles in the development of this story. I am referring to Bernal Nápoles, whom we met in Sicily when…
“Bernal Nápoles stabbed Vittorio Scolccini in a corner wet with urine and devoid of lights. He stuck the dagger behind his ribs while he hugged him, where it kills but doesn’t hurt, and pulled it back when he felt his body go limp in his arms like a woolen doll. He took the papers and bills from him and without looking back left him bleeding” (Page 127).
This mafia homicide was going to last over time and geography to finally take place in the Atacama desert. This is also how the story of the Great Captain Don Diego de Almagro, with whose name this novel begins and whose presence also appears in the final paragraphs, would be prolonged:
“The proud Castilian heard the wheel of the club turn, but he only asked for mercy from heaven, not from men: he was unaware, it is true, of the fate of his subjects.
“Those who four hundred and thirty-five years later trampled that land and the women and men of that land, having been born in it, also asked for mercy after being judged. Their accusers allowed them to speak, they allowed them to defend themselves, but they could not believe them again” (Pages 307 and 308).
For all types of readers, “Sad Tuesdays” will provoke the joy that the best literature generates.
“SAD TUESDAY”
FRANCISCO RIVAS
MAGIC PUBLISHING, 308 PAGES