“No one comes to the real south / nor does anyone come on vacation.
/ The south is not visited.
/ The south is carried inside like an organ,” writes the Andalusian poet Isabel Pérez Montalbán.
The south is not so much an exoticism of aromas and cante jondo as belonging to a social class.
Similarly, Víctor Erice did not want to film the south in Adelaida García Morales's novel but as an accent that triggers the imagination.
Perhaps it is not necessary to be so blunt, but just to work on literary material that is far from cliché.
In
La seca
, the new novel by Txani Rodríguez (Llodio, 1977), the south is the vacation spot of the two protagonists, Matilde and Nuria, mother and daughter who alternately reverse their roles.
It is now Nuria who feels that she must take care of her mother: from her old age and an operation, from her childhood fickleness and from the threat of an epidemic, COVID, which is already beginning to spread around the world.
That is why both of them, neighbors of Llodio, have ended up in an inland town in the countryside of Gibraltar, the family and vacation town.
A territory where “in the morning, in the countryside, the air seems freshly rinsed, and smells of rosemary, oregano, thyme, pennyroyal.”
Where they work on cork extraction and “the image of those men on the branches is powerful and ancient, but it is threatened.”
And where the deceased father, the Civil Guard (Nuria remembers), “held a glass of Sanlúcar manzanilla [and] did not take his eyes off the singer […], sitting very upright in his reed chair.”
She felt that “when listening to the song, you can travel to the very center of the forests [and] lose your sight in the flames of a low bonfire, around which broken voices resonate that reveal the ultimate meaning of the blackness of the evening".
The main problem with
La seca
is its exoticism, which is not limited to well-known descriptions.
It affects the characters of the “town” themselves, who move on the dangerous edge of the tourist imagination: Montero, Nuria's summer love, rude, beautiful and seductive;
and his wife, Alba, a sensitive poet and quiet woman;
and, Ezequiel, father of Montero, who wounds the earth with his ax to get rid of the disease.
In the same way, metaphor and context work in all-too-familiar territory
.
Dry disease is, first of all, the disease that ruins cork oaks.
But there is also a whole ecological plot that is about to put an end to the beauty of the landscape, and that allows the author to oppose the use of the land as sustenance (the vision of those in the town) with the idyllic image of those who arrive from vacations, like Nuria.
The parallel between the drought and the pandemic is also evident.
But also, “the dry one” is, in a metaphorical sense, the protagonist herself, Nuria.
She is grumpy, without the ability to let anyone around her live or to live herself.
Her world did her harm that she cannot overcome.
La seca
has the vocation of a film: it is narrated in small “visual” chapters to which literature adds sensory picturesqueness.
And everything seems to happen suddenly, the entire life of a town, legend included, in just one month: a suicide, a murdered cat, a river threatened by industry, the dry season itself, two terrifying children who announce misfortunes, cuckoldry and divorce. , a new love, the end of that new love, even karmic revenge!
Txani Rodríguez works best when she clears the way: thus in the mother-daughter relationship, which would have benefited from fewer elements.
But in
La seca
too many conventions weigh on what should be a fast-paced story and a southern town.
Look for it in your bookstore
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