Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli laughs.
“Wow, this can be dangerous,” she says before she begins a tarot reading with Mexican storyteller Julián Herbert, a prediction enthusiast.
EL PAÍS has brought together both creators for a meeting in which they talk about magic, literature and politics.
Herbert is the one chosen to do the tarot reading: he will read Belli's future and at her request, what awaits her country, Nicaragua, plunged into a deep political crisis.
Belli, who is presenting her new book Luciérnagas
at the Guadalajara International Book Fair
—a very personal book of essays, in which she delves into the crisis of Sandinismo, her passion for writing and feminism— explains that her relationship with this instrument Magical began when she was writing her novel
Sofía de los omens
(Seix Barral), in 1990. The protagonist of the novel finds herself abandoned in a Nicaraguan town famous for witchcraft, its witches and its warlocks, and Belli wanted to understand how that world full of of mysticism, because "it was important in Sofia's life."
Then he began to read about the tarot and study it.
“I read a lot about witches and tarot,” she says.
Then she took a trip to Peru and [writer] Eduardo Galeano recommended a woman who was very good at reading.
“I haven't read it in a long time,” she says, laughing.
"Then it's your turn to throw it away," she tells Herbert.
For his part, the Mexican tells that his relationship with tarot began in 2019, when a friend commissioned him to write a reading manual.
So he only read the I Chin, the Chinese oracle, but he got so excited, that he learned all about the prediction through the cards.
On Wednesday night, he will present a tarot collection designed by a friend and with a manual written by him, El tarot de la taberna
, at the Guadalajara International Fair
, and promises an intense evening, with reading included for those who dare among the audience. .
"Whoever thinks that the tarot is nonsense has a great ignorance," he says.
“The tarot belongs to magic, yes, but it is also a study of the unconscious, it is a cultural tradition”, he stresses.
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