2023-10-04 00:09:06
Updated Wednesday, October 4, 2023 – 00:09
‘El Infierno’, the new novel from the authors of ‘The Beast’, travels to Havana of the sugar plantations and the delusions of Indian grandeur.
Agustín Martínez, Jorge Díaz and Antonio Santos Mercero, on the outskirts of Havana.JAVIER OCAA
If we mixed the usual romantic novel with Cline’s Journey to the End of the Night, with historical fiction with a colonial aesthetic (more in the style of Brazilian soap operas than that of Marguerite Duras), with 19th century soap operas like Les Miserables, , with the thriller rude and joking of Tarantino’s generation, with the political crime novel in the vein of Sjwall and Wahl, with a little Galician-Caribbean magical realism Alejo Cunqueiro-lvaro Carpentierwith everything noble and everything ignoble that the craft of writing stories can offer… If it were possible to write a novel with all that baggage, the result would have to resemble Hell (Planet), by Carmen Mola, the pseudonym with the one in which Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Santos Mercero have been signing their books since 2018.
What else is Hell? First of all, it is Carmen Mola’s second period novel after The Beast and the first that takes the action out of Spain and takes it to another place, to Havana. In the 1860s, in a period of liberal revolts and police repression, two opposite characters cross paths on the streets of Madrid. His name is Mauro, he studies Medicine, he is poor, idealistic and handsome and he represents a Galician Jean Valjean. And she is his Fantine, her name is Leonor, she is an actress (more beautiful than good) and she doesn’t care about politics, but her path crosses Mauro’s by chance. On a day of riots, Leonor saves Mauro and Mauro saves Leonor and, along the way, the two become the enemies of a sinister policeman who is like Victor Hugo’s Javert. So the couple falls in love and separates during their escape and then reunites without knowing it because the two flee to Cuba, each one on her side: she as the wife of convenience of a rich sugar businessman (which will take a while to know if it is better or worse than it seems). And he, like a cop who will become a slave on a plantation where the Galician emigration of hunger shares hardships with the blacks and the Chinese.
The three authors of Carmen Mola are in Havana to present Hell. There is something paradoxical in the Cuban capital, which should have been the city of revolution and rupture in the 20th century but which has become the best possible setting to communicate with the 19th century, even if it is in the form of ruins and tiny tenements of limestone stone. The walk with the authors of Hell begins in the noble part of Old Havana, but heads almost instinctively towards its former red light districts, the landscapes of some of its scenes. The place is amazing: a kind of Cdiz a thousand times expanded and devastated by poverty. The best historical architecture in Spain is in Havana and it is in ruins and, with it, many of its inhabitants. A man with a medal on his guayabera spontaneously appears before the Spanish writers and says that he is the vice minister of Culture. At first it seems like it’s all a joke, but it may be serious.
“This It was a bright, wonderful and elegant city; On the other hand, the city we see now is decadent,” says Jorge Díaz. His portrait of Havana has its share of tinsel and refinements but, deep down, it is a political portrait more than anything else. In short, Hell is a portrait of a brutally stratified society. At one end is the saccharocracy, the elite of the millionaires of slavery and sugar; at the other end, their slaves appear. And in the middle, the liberal classes, a crack in the system that will allow In fiction, Mauro and Leonor meet again and turn their love into a fight for freedom.
There were a series of characters, hustlers who came to Havana with nothing and prospered. For us there is a real character that we have as a reference, Pancho Marty. He was a Spaniard who settled in the port of Havana, took control of the fish that arrived, created a network of power and then moved into the slave trade. He became a multimillionaire and was one of the richest people in Havana. And the curious thing is that, despite not having any training and being quite uneducated, that man loved the theater. He bought the Villanueva Theater. At a time when there was a lot of money in Cuba, that meant bringing opera companies from Europe to do the entire season… Just as they brought the best cloths and the best fabrics from France, says Agustín Martínez.
It was a world in which everyone wanted to have noble titles, give great parties, make ostentation, open the doors of the palaces, he continues. It was a very classist society. The Creoles had managed to enter the Government, but there was a reactionary movement that threw them out. It was once again those sent from Spain who took power. And the Creoles developed a national identity and began to free slaves.
Slavery is a very important word in hell. “They took 20-year-old Galician boys to Cuba as slaves, who were not even 20 years old. They were brought to die in Cuba, deceived with the promise of becoming rich and returning as Indians, just as is done today with trafficking.” of women,” says Antonio Santos Mercero. “In Spain we have not done like in the United States, where there are a thousand films and novels about slavery. About the Spanish… I believe there is the book by Bibiana Candia, which we really liked. [Azucre: una epopeya]. Furthermore, he is in White Mongo, by Carlos Bardem and The Valley of the Archangels, by Rafael Tarradas Bult and nothing else. And in the cinema I don’t remember anything.”
“It is not a question of doing historical revisionism but to cast a critical look at the history of this country,” adds Agustín Martínez. “They are historical facts, things that happened. And I don’t know why they are ignored, because they are a good substrate for more fiction.” And Jorge Díaz continues: “I guess there is some shame, right? Spain had prohibited slavery on the peninsula, but maintained it in the colonies. The last country to ban slavery was Brazil in 1888. In Cuba, they only abolished it two years earlier. When we say that we Spaniards mixed together, that we were not like the Anglo-Saxons, who exterminated… Well, let’s see, we will have to remember that we Spaniards were the penultimate slave owners. “And I know that a large part of the abolitionism in Cuba came from the Spaniards who arrived, who were not accustomed to that life in which one man could dispose of the life of another.”
The old Villanueva theater, scene of ‘Hell’JAVIER OCAA
Santos Mercero ends: “When we studied the 19th century, no one told us that Spain was a slave power.. And much less did they tell us that all those characters who appear in our novel and who became rich in colonial Cuba, became very important families within the Catalan bourgeoisie, built half of Santander, had children who were mayors of Madrid and still have great streets in his name… There are two facts that are being erased from our memory: slavery and the origin of certain fortunes.
Carmen Mola’s men say that this approach is nothing new, that the essence of their work has always consisted of making stories of rebellion, “based on strong women, who move history forward. Traditionally there are not so many women like that in the books, they are the murdered ones. In this book, Leonor is the opposite, is the character who makes the entire journey, the one who suffers and changes“says Santos Mercero.
Anything else to say about Carmen Mola’s role in the world? “If someone gets angry when they discover that we were three men, we understand.”
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