“Truth comes first before peace,” Miguel de Unamuno used to proclaim, in reality and as a fictional character who fills the pages of
The First Case of Unamuno
, by Luis García Jambrina (Alfaguara).
The year is 1905 and the chief of the Salamanca town of Boada is brutally murdered.
Three day laborers who had had disputes with him are quickly arrested and accused: the death penalty awaits them, an injustice against which the philosopher stands up, converted here into a detective, antihero of a genre that increasingly seeks its characters in the past. .
“It seemed like the most normal thing in the world to me.
Unamuno throughout his life had sought the truth, the truth hidden by lies, or the truth falsified by appearances.
And he did it both academically and politically: look for it, say it and do something with it.
He was an unbribable character even when it cost him exile or his life," says Jambrina at the Novelty café, the first setting of the novel that this newspaper visited with the author last week, before he left for the BCNegra festival, which It is celebrated this week in Barcelona and where the hybrid between the detective and the historical will be one of the attractions.
The fog that opened the day –– the same one in which the characters are enveloped in the last scenes of the novel –– has given way to a sun that does not alleviate the cold in the Plaza Mayor.
Jambrina, last September in front of the façade of the old rectory, today the Unamuno House-Museum and an important setting for the novel, below the inscription with Unamuno's famous motto: “Truth comes first before peace.” Carmen Borrego
The life of Jambrina (Zamora, 64 years old) is crossed by the figure of Unamuno from his youthful readings, through his first scholarship work (in the organization of the intellectual's archive) to his current teaching at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Salamanca, stepping on the same tiles as Unamuno in his last stage.
“I'm not a specialist,” he clarifies with amusement, “the thing is that I've had a lot of dealings with him.”
He needed, however, a good dose of reality to be able to move on to fiction.
Jambrina says that it was after
The Double Death of Unamuno
(Captain Swing), a book written by four hands with Manuel Menchón, that she realized the possibilities of the character.
There remained, however, a small twist: “Instead of being the object of the criminal investigation, he becomes a subject.”
The Zamorano author is not new to these paths that have been so frequented for some time now in the noir genre (in recent months novels starring Gonzalo de Bercero and Jean Austen have been published): in 2008 he published
The Stone Manuscript
(Alfaguara), a criminal story starring Fernando de Rojas as an investigator and which is now in its sixth installment.
The crime occurs in Boada - "a town about to become a cemetery", in the author's words - and Unamuno, obsessed with justice and the triumph of reason, travels there on several occasions, but the true setting of the novel is Salamanca: a city that stinks, in decay, where people are hungry and cold, but that maintains the elegance of its Renaissance palaces, its monumentality and those facades with the warm stone of Villamayor that accompanies us during the walk through the scenes of a novel that makes the city feel.
There is the Casino, where Unamuno incites the members with his slogans of freedom and justice;
or the majestic convent of San Esteban, a place of refuge at a given moment, in real life and in this crime novel.
“I'm interested in the city as something more than a backdrop,” says Jambrina as we cross Campo de San Francisco park, the favorite place for Unamuno's walks, very close to the house where he died, and where he is found in this novel. with Teresa Maragall.
The game of life
Who is this woman?
A young anarchist who helps him in the investigation, a character who appears late but grows to take over each page, giving the narrative that game of life so typical of adventure novels.
Her relationship with Unamuno brings up a major problem with this type of work: where is the limit of fiction?
Jambrina uses extensive documentation that filters easily into the settings and the characters' ways of speaking, but what happens when sensitive topics are touched upon?
“You had to be respectful of the truth of the character.
He was monogamous and faithful to Doña Concha.
There was the red line that could not be crossed,” defends the author.
There is a game throughout the novel, very Unamunian, according to which life and fiction are mixed, to the point that Teresa receives that name from Unamuno's book of the same name - which Jambrina strongly claims and of which she is preparing an edition. — and for the woman the author lost while writing this book, a story of heartbreak that compensates with another in fiction.
The novel advances through these streets of Salamanca and through the hallways of the university with agility and an effective narrative mix that works, according to its author, “because of the irony and self-confidence” with which it approaches such a great figure to turn her into a detective.
But it does not forget two central aspects of the genre: truth and social justice.
“Political commitment always moved Unamuno and he wanted it to be seen in the novel.
Now, sometimes you get to the truth and things stay as they are,” he reflects.
An amateur reader of crime novels, Jambrina resorts in
The First Case of Unamuno
to the classic Holmesian couple: the philosopher is helped by Manuel Rivera, a lawyer and a counterweight.
But the true figure with which the intellectual identifies, in the novel and in life, is Don Quixote.
During lunch, with the Company's spectacular street as a stage, Jambrina reviews his projects, designed with pencil drawings: first, a new story, perhaps the last, with Fernando de Rojas;
then, Teresa
's edition
and only then Unamuno's second adventure through those streets.
Three more will follow, one per decade, until 1934.
Jambrina poses in the Unamuno style in September in the upper cloister of the Historical Building of the University or Senior Schools, next to where the philosopher taught. Carmen Borrego
The novel does not leave aside Unamuno's family life, and the walk through its settings (very present in an area of the city that has not changed much since 1905) reaches the School patio, the scene of a family moment for Unamuno in the fiction that remains stained by a dark presence.
A few meters away is the rectory, with its spectacular vine on the balcony, now converted into an extraordinary museum dedicated to the author of
Niebla
.
That is 221b Baker Street of this philosopher turned detective.
“Nothing human is foreign to me, not even murder,” the fictional character argues within those walls.
The one in real life could have said it well.
An antihero is born.
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