The novel invites us to inhabit a world where the boundaries between the sacred and the fantastic were blurred, in which indigenous myths were viewed as having “infected and deformed our systems of knowledge,” that saw the publication of religious missives and tracts while books deemed “harmful to the mind” were condemned, and in which the Church is corrupted from within by plotters working in the service of the Peruvian Viceroy of the day. 

With this latest work, Roncagliolo traces the contours of a story where witches, nuns, and an Inquisition prosecutor named Alonso Morales seek to uncover the true provenance of a creature born in Ciudad de los Reyes in 1623. Running the gamut from saintliness to sorcery (the young woman Rosa, for instance, is rumoured to be able to converse with God and the Devil), this novel masterfully traces the hidden corners of political and religious thought in a period when outsized concepts of good and evil were cast as direct opposites.

Juan Camilo Rincón: You initially set out to write a novel about twenty-first-century witches, but the archival research process led you to the 1600s. Had you any prior knowledge of this period? 

Santiago Roncagliolo: No, I was pretty clueless, and had no special interest in it. At the same time, there was a personal connection via my grandfather, to whom the novel is dedicated. He was a historian. People said he was a conservative historian, but that’s not entirely accurate. Conservatives want things to remain the way they are; my grandfather wanted a wholesale return to the eighteenth century, which seemed to him like a much more reasonable, more comprehensible and more civilized place than the country he had grown up in, which was pure chaos, a disaster no matter what period you were living in. Chaotic in a general sense. His feeling was that, back then, at least there had been order. I started studying his books, which in reality constituted the world he inhabited, a much more tolerable one than the world he existed in physically, and I started to see the world through his eyes. This was partly my motivation. He wasn’t a leftist exactly, and he saw the act of interpretation as a Marxist move. For him, history was just there, it was what had happened and there was no reason to repeat it. His books are full of details; he was like a demon in the archives and he found gold in the personal lives of the people of that time and in the theatre of the time; a whole chapter in the novel takes place in the theatre, which comes from a book of his, and from there I also began to encounter this universe in which everything was sent by God or else sent by the Devil, full of witches, saints, flagellations, heavens and hells. The more time I spent there, the more I became obsessed with this world, because of how it lies at the root of the one we live in now, but also because of its visual splendour and how fascinating it was to set a story there. 

J.C.R.: Tell us a bit about the book Las hijas de los conquistadores, one of your sources. 

S.R.: It’s a book by Luis Martín, who I believe was a Jesuit. That’s where I got a lot of my ideas for the portrayal of the convent, which is really a kind of liberated territory. Martín’s book has these wonderful details, like the letters sent by a bishop to Rome saying he has already told the nuns in his convent they cannot sleep in pairs, and so he’s bought them mattresses, but with their new mattresses they continued sleeping in pairs and they just don’t get it! In many of these convents, the women might be lesbians, or sexually active, or writers or singers, and they were freer than the women on the outside. Many convents were violently raided by the army to contain these nuns with their decadence and their scandals. But there are also the holier types like St. Rose who, in their own way, find a way to avoid being somebody’s wife; marrying God was one of the best escape routes. 

J.C.R.: They also tell us a lot about the spirit of the age. 

S.R.: The thing is that the nuns were the wives of God in an official sense, but the truly holy among them were also wives in the sense that they were in direct communication with Him, receiving instructions and performing miracles. At the same time, it was a way of life that was not so far off from witchcraft—after all, what’s the difference between talking to God and talking to the Devil? Or between casting a spell and working a miracle? However, these women also found a way to acquire power, admirers, and dedicated followers. When St. Rosa of Lima died, the crowds threw themselves on her corpse to tear off strips and keep them as relics: a fingernail, a tooth, or a hair. Another kind of path that could be followed. And then there was the rebellion; out of that there emerged characters like Mencia, Jerónima and Alonso’s own mother, who also found a way to live, to try to help her son… It’s more warped, but it is still a way of living and of trying to survive in that world. 

J.C.R.: Have you always thought of Alonso Morales in the first person?

S.R.: For me, it was very important that he wasn’t a person who thinks like someone from the twenty-first century, that he wasn’t just some guy plonked down into a seventeenth century setting. I had to get inside his head for this project to work, for the reader to be able to follow his thoughts and from there to see the world he inhabited; otherwise, it was going to be very complicated to get into the story. He’s trying to figure out why the Devil has appeared, so to begin with he needed to have a lot of internal monologue going on inside his head. The archaic language is another crucial element here; it was the most difficult thing to reconstruct, but it helps you to get into the seventeenth-century mindset. The first version was formally accurate, but I realized it was also unreadable. In any case, the whole exercise was already fictitious by nature because, to begin with, he would never have written about his own life in a report. If I became overly concerned with verisimilitude, the story would be impossible to write, so I had to play with what I knew of the language to create one that would be convincing, but at the same time would be entertaining, and that readers wouldn’t have to struggle with on every page. 

J.C.R.: Someone was saying this is a novel about bodies, and it made me think about how, during this period, the body was a vehicle for many things: sacrifice, public torture as a mode of instruction, the liberated bodies of the nuns, the immaterial body as a pathway to God…  

S.R.: The Catholic church has a blatant hatred for the body; it regards the soul as that which brings you closer to God and the body and its appetites as doing the complete opposite of that. In fact, one of the things that struck me was how flagellation was viewed as a sign of virtue: you flagellate and punish yourself, hurting your body in order to be a good person. I remember one time I got hurt playing soccer and my grandmother told me: offer that suffering to the Lord. This idea has survived until very recently in Catholicism, the idea that your body is bad and therefore pain is good, because it punishes your body. Rosa is constantly destroying her body; she spends her whole life doing it, nailing spiked chastity belts to herself, sticking her hands in quicklime because her body could attract men, and was therefore wicked and impure. Many of today’s political struggles revolve around having ownership of your body. From abortion to transgender rights, most of today’s progressive causes are about defending the right to do whatever you want with your body, that it’s up to each person to decide. Nowadays, the novel’s witches would all be political activists. They are the ones leading the marches, rather than ascending the scaffold to be hanged. I guess that’s a kind of progress.

J.C.R.: What was your biggest challenge in writing this novel? 

S.R.: The language, which I started working on in a very rigorous way before realising it wasn’t necessary to use seventeenth-century language; instead, I had to invent a language that sounded sufficiently like the seventeenth century, and that would allow Alonso to tell his own story while still retaining the register of an official report. The main difficulty was not that it was very complex language, but quite the opposite: it is very simple. It’s a very simple society where everything is binary: God is good, the Devil is bad and so there isn’t much room for nuance or grey areas, but you can’t sustain a novel with such two-dimensional ideas and characters. The characters had to be complex; they all have positive attributes as well as woeful ones, but it had to work within this language that, on the surface, is so basic and notarial. That was the hardest part.

J.C.R.: Which is your favourite character, or which was the hardest to construct, for example? 

S.R.: The women were the hardest. Mencia, for example, who is terrible, overbearing and egotistical but is also a heroine; she has freed these women from the outside world, which is a much worse prison than the world of the convent. Jerónima is another, because I like this idea that she was real (she’s also taken from Luis Martín’s book). Women were very liberated inside the convent, but black women were still black; there was no equality of races or backgrounds. However, a dark-skinned woman could become a nun if she sang well because the choir was where the nuns’ voices rose up to God, and if those voices were beautiful, God would be more inclined to listen. Indeed, there was a Hieronymite nun who was dark-skinned and who was accepted as a nun because she sang. And then Rosa herself, whom I still find difficult to classify: is she psychotic, is she a witch, or is she a saint, or simply an ambitious woman who has found a path to obtaining power? I don’t think we will ever know, and that ambiguity fascinates me and makes me fall in love with her. Alonso is like my proxy in this world, he represents my own inability to understand these women or what it is that motivates them, maybe because you always want to think they are just one thing and in the end they are all things at the same time.

J.C.R.: And also the characters have many nuances; there aren’t any all-out good or all-out bad guys. 

S.R.: That happens a lot in my books. Things get inverted and the detective ends up being almost indistinguishable from the monsters. And the monsters end up being not too different from the detective. I like the idea of genre fiction where there’s an investigation. It’s important that it be a personal investigation on the part of the protagonist; that they find out something about themselves and that it changes their life. That the detective not only solve an external mystery but that they undergo a change in the process; that neither detective nor reader can ever be the same afterwards. I think, in the end, we all see everything as being about ourselves. If we’re drawn to a protagonist, it’s because they embody things we carry within ourselves. 

J.C.R.:  What was the discovery that most surprised you while you were trawling the archives?

S.R.: On a historical level, everything I’ve just been talking about, but what constantly surprised me were the things that still haven’t changed to this day. Like the city in which the story takes place, which is this walled enclosure inhabited exclusively by white people, away from other races and socioeconomic classes. I mean, just look at this neighborhood we’re in right now, or my neighborhood in Lima, or Latin America as a whole, which is still full of these exclusive, gated settlements. The Inquisition-era ideas of women as inherently guilty and of public punishment are now at the heart of how social media operates, with its show trials and its merciless shaming of those who don’t play by the rules. I believe twenty years ago we were more modern than now; today we are getting closer and closer to the seventeenth century. Modern democracy (which we thought had triumphed as an idea, at least in the 1990s) was based on a very revolutionary principle that had never been applied before in history: the idea that if someone is different from you, they are not a bad person, but just another person with whom you agree to coexist. The financial crisis, then the pandemic, resource depletion, and then corruption… Many things have been causing people to doubt democracy’s viability as a system, but if there’s no democracy, we are left with what we had in the seventeenth century: the tribe. We’re the good guys, and everyone else is wrong and must be punished, canceled, silenced. Social media lets you gather a tribe together in five minutes flat, two hundred thousand people or whatever, and what’s more, they’ll make you feel good because you can post your thoughts and if those thoughts are witty, you can have ten thousand people giving you a “like” and making you feel like you’re on the right side of history. Suddenly you are the inquisitor: you’re the one who knows how people should be. 

Translated by David Conlon

Photo: Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo, by Xavier Torres-Bacchetta.

In 2018, he received first prize from the Asociación de Entidades Periodísticas Argentinas in the “Culture and History” category. He currently gives seminars on Borges. He created the #BorgesPalooza festival, headed marketing strategy campaigns such as #PagaAira and #BorgesChallenge and the Borge’s Jazz project (an improvised class on Borges that premiered at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in August 2019), and promoted the #BorgesChallenge on social media in honor of the writer’s one hundred twenty-first birthday.

Juan Camilo Rincón: Why is it important to read César Aira today? 

Daniel Mecca: Because he’s a disproportionate figure in Argentine literature. I don’t mean that pejoratively, but in the sense that he’s published over a hundred novels and translated dozens of books (although this latter fact is relatively unknown). We talk a lot about Aira as a novelist and very little about Aira as a translator, but one way or another, his translation work gives us a lens through which to observe what lies behind this disproportion. Aira provokes something very elemental in me with his literature: happiness. And it’s not arbitrary happiness, it’s a happiness that goes hand-in-hand with his construction of very fairy-tale-style plotlines. He even calls them his novelitas and classifies them as Dadaist fairy tales, which brings us to the link between Aira and Marel Duchamp. Within these plotlines—which are very simple, very outrageous, very “Once upon a time…”—lies this effect of happiness he provokes in readers, which comes from setting your imagination free. Aira imagines, he puts forth a scenario—he doesn’t write the literature of the self, which really dominates the literary scene on a global scale. Aira can be read in many ways, but I never want to stop stressing the happiness that comes from reading him. 

J.C.R.: You make me think of Borges, who has a very broad body of work, so you don’t always know where to start… Something similar happens with Aira. What books would you recommend to get started reading him?

D.M.: Well, you mentioned Borges, so before turning to an Aira reading guide, I’d like to emphasize that they have something very important in common. On the one hand you have Aira, who has written over a hundred novels, and on the other you have Borges, who didn’t write even one. This allows us to go deeper and reflect, in the first place, on the fact that Borges was just as disproportionate a writer as César Aira. He wrote hundreds of articles, essays, translations, texts that are always floating around somewhere. He was a writer who, while disproportionately productive, had to make a living. For example, in the years when he was writing what I see as his most important works—Ficciones and El Aleph—Borges was working at a municipal library in the Boedo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It was a very unpleasant time of life for him, from 1937 to 1946, when he produced most of his best works. We’re talking about his story-writing phase, especially in the forties. Then we find the link between Aira and Borges, which is this focus on brevity. Aira’s novels are very brief; some have only twenty pages, and we see the same brevity in Borges. On the other hand, they both have a conceptual bent to them; there is an idea that goes beyond the texts, a singular autonomy, a general idea, an identity, a philosophy behind their literature, and in both cases, this philosophy has to do with conceptualism, with the Duchampian. It’s worth noting that Aira outwardly identifies with this; Borges did not. He was quite wary of linking himself to the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, and did not place himself among them. But that conceptual leaning, the idea and aesthetic of provocation are in both of them; they are both provocateurs, and we find that trait in their respective oeuvres. Lastly, I would also say that in both of them we see the creation of probable worlds and improbable worlds; they are constantly playing with the line between fiction and reality, and this categorical struggle between one setting and the other gives rise to texts that are still being written today. Aira could stop publishing his novelitas and it would still feel as if he were writing; something similar happens with Borges. The Airean and the Borgesian are much closer together than we think, and that’s crucially important.

J.C.R.: And now, with which books should we start reading Aira?

D.M.: It’s a complex question because, speaking of disproportion, there are many possible entryways: La guerra de los gimnasios, El congreso de literatura, Parménides, Fulgentius, I’d probably add El embalse, and if we wanted to add a couple more, La liebre and Los misterios de Rosario.

J.C.R.: We know the tradition of Argentine translators like Borges himself, Julio Cortázar, and Victoria Ocampo, as well as Aira, of course. Which works has he translated? What’s his work like? What kind of literature does he like to translate?

D.M.: His translation might seem to be at the periphery of his work, but that’s not really the case. I feel it’s a role that has fallen into ostracism, and today there’s a powerful struggle from translators to appear on the covers of their books, not inside on the first page. That’s very important because every translation creates a new text. It’s worth rereading Borges’s Las versiones homéricas, the essay where he presents this idea that there’s no such thing as the definitive text. He explores this expression and says the idea of the definitive text belongs only to religion or exhaustion. To corroborate his point, he cites the same excerpt from the Odyssey, if I remember correctly, translated by different authors, and they seem like completely different texts. And therein lies the importance—which is essential to underscore—of translators. I just published a biography of the siblings Estela and Patricio Canto, and one of the questions that runs through the book is why the figures who have translated classic works of literature, such as the Cantos (Estela translated six of the seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and hers is considered its finest translation into Spanish, even better than the one by Pedro Salinas), have been forgotten. I asked the critic and writer Luis Chitarroni that question, and he answered, “What translator hasn’t been ostracized?” Who among us knows Aira has translated just as many books as he has written? To make a sort of synthetic visual reel, I noted down some of the books or authors I’ve found that he has translated; for example, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, Pet Sematary and Misery by Stephen King, works by Oscar Wilde like “The Canterville Ghost,” Ray Bradbury, Arthur Conan Doyle… Once you start getting into it, you realize something even more important, as a consequence of Aira the translator: Aira the reader. To write what Aira writes, he had to have read and translated all of this, so I suggest that you also enter into his world as a translator. If I may go even further, there’s a beautiful novelita by Aira, La princesa primavera, in which a princess who lives in the land of spring is attacked by her kinsman, General Winter—classic Aira. It’s all very childish, but it also incorporates the issue of translation because the princess is a translator; she makes a living translating bad novels and puts this craft into operation. For example, in Parménides we meet the first ghostwriter of Greek literature when Parmenides hires Perinola, one of the main characters, to ghostwrite the great book he wants to compose, but Parmenides never clarifies exactly what he should say in the book, and years keep passing and passing… It’s a beautiful delusion. 

J.C.R.: You published a book about Aira. Tell us about that.

D.M.: Yes, it’s called Aira o muerte. The title is meant to be provocative; it comes from the language of the seventies, specifically from Che Guevara’s “Patria o Muerte,” and it plays with those kinds of slogans. What’s going on in Aira o muerte, based on intertextually recouping some of his texts—for example, La liebre—is a journalist discovers that Aira has formed a clandestine organization of his own doppelgangers in an attempt to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Aira himself, as a character, tries to correct an injustice: he’s a candidate every year, but they never give it to him. So he starts putting together an underground army of doubles, whom he trains with warlike devotion, leading to hilarious scenes; for example, they blockade a major bridge in Buenos Aires, the Pueyrredón Bridge, which is usually blocked by protesters for social or political causes, but in this case they block the bridge to read Aira. The novel is in dialogue with Ray Bradbury’s 1984, with various totalitarian moves within the literary scene in order to seize power not just in Argentina, but over the Swedish Academy itself, such that they must give him the Nobel by force. I won’t tell you the ending, but the idea is to found the Legibrerian Republic, which appears in Aira’s novels.

J.C.R.: What was the most recent conversation you had with him?

D.M.: It was a café conversation, I gave him the book. When we got in touch before, he was very excited to receive it because the prologue is by Luis Chitarroni, whom I mentioned earlier, and they were friends. That was a doorway to legitimacy that made him think it might be worth taking a look. Aira is a very difficult person to access, not in the elitist sense of the phrase—someone who doesn’t want to stoop down to other mortals because he’s locked away in his house writing his next novel, etc.—but rather because he’s just not interested. He lives a humdrum life in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires, he takes the subway, he barely uses a cell phone. He likes to follow certain protocols in his life; he goes to a café to write, he comes home, nothing out of the ordinary. I once asked one of his friends, probably the one who knows his work best, if he would ever write a biography of César Aira, and he said, “No! It would be the most boring book in the world.” That makes a lot of sense because the extraordinary thing about Aira is not his life but his work, and that, sometimes—going against the current of our times—is the most valuable thing about him: the recovery of that lost capital once held by the imagination, in contrast with the importance of the author. He doesn’t want to be important as an author; he wants to recover that lost capital that is the craft of the imagination, the craft of making up stories, the counterpoint of the self in literature. The great poet Wallace Stevens once said, “Poetry is not personal,” and I think that is reflected in Aira’s literature. Returning to our last encounter, it was a very pleasant chat. We talked about literature, about music, he told me he was reading Joyce’s Ulysses for the third time—so there we see the disproportion a little, we start to understand. You also wonder when he finds the time to do everything he does; he is clearly very methodical and organized. I always say there’s no need to be anyone’s exegete or groupie. Aira o muerte doesn’t have that intention. Rather, it tries to follow the same impulse Aira uses in his texts; this idea of the proliferation of delusions, of expropriating solemnity, which is one of the things that most interests me about Aira’s literature: along with bringing happiness, it makes you laugh. You’re reading it and you start smiling: What the hell was he thinking?! And I say this in the best possible light: How did he come up with this?! I never would’ve thought of it in a thousand lifetimes. I think having him with us—having his literature—is something for which all of us readers should be grateful.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Argentine writer Daniel Mecca, by Pedro Lázaro Fernández.

Set in the seventies, in a convulsing Argentina one year before the military coup led by Rafael Videla and others, Sacheri’s new novel, with its measured emotive tone and rich shades of irony, recapitulates this complex period in which the actions of a few guerrilla organizations promised the advent of a new country after the death of Juan Domingo Perón.

“People think death is supposed to be meaningful. But the more bodies that pile up, the less each death means,” says El Cabezón to his friend Alejandro, referring to the modus operandi of the ERP. Nosotros dos en la tormenta is a book about doubt and questioning one’s beliefs, with a look towards a past that could easily have been the present day.

Juan Camilo Rincón: What was it like to build a storyline with such a complex history as the backdrop?

Eduardo Sacheri: This novel gave me a good amount more work than others, even if every novel is work. In this case, I knew I’d be grappling with a painful period of conflict. The novel is set in 1975 (I was eight years old at the time) and it seemed important to study this period—please note the verb I used, study—to remove it from the realm of my own personal, family memories, which were in many ways the emotional driving force behind this story. I would say that first I did an entire academic study. A lot of work has already been done in Argentina on armed organizations, ideology and organizational structure, as well as the connection between these things and political power and social relations, or lack thereof. In addition to that, I had conversations with ex-guerrillas and their victims or relatives of their victims—it seemed important to bring a human dimension back to those whose lives were so spectacularly affected. Only then did I begin on the plot. I asked myself: What can I tell about this period? What kinds of characters can I construct? At that point I envisioned them as paths that cross. I didn’t want to impose a way of reading, independently of each individual’s ideas. Instead, it was more interesting to create a point of dialogue, or at least to let the story be seen from different perspectives—my perspective being just one of many. I think that was the biggest challenge of this novel. 

J.C.R.: The dictatorship has been portrayed extensively in Argentine cinema, music and literature, but your novel precedes this period. How did you address this period in your novel?

E.S.: The entire novel takes place in 1975. I picked that year because it was extremely turbulent, even if it was before the coup. In Argentina, the military government has been given enormous attention in the cinema and in literature, with good reason, but that’s not the case for the preceding period or the period directly afterwards, even though a ton of things happened, a ton of situations and political actors intertwined in the story. Perón had returned to Argentina in ’73. Two months before that, a general election took place in which he was not allowed to participate, and it was won by Héctor Cámpora, his assistant, his right-hand man, his proxy. Cámpora stepped down almost immediately afterwards, and new elections were called. Perón was elected, with his wife María Estela Martínez de Perón serving as vice president. Several revolutionary organizations were active in that Argentina, especially Montoneros and the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), whose base was Trotskyist, Maoist, and Guevarist, a very orthodox left. Although Montoneros had the same objective of social revolution, a socialist paradise, they made the decision to support Perón. This was a conscious decision made voluntarily: if the people are Peronist, we have to be, too. When Perón was in exile, this youthful agitation for his return was beneficial to him, but when he returned, his order was: now you must be disciplined, fall into line, follow orders, you are part of the movement. This was a Perón that was clearly more a creature of the right than the left.

J.C.R.: And therein the source of the split…

E.S.: Right, because Montoneros refused to fall into line. Perón died almost immediately afterwards, and at that point Peronism descended into a violent confrontation between the Peronist right and left. In the novel, it wasn’t my preference to get into the nitty-gritty of this conflict. Rather, it was to feature the project of both these organizations, but this was an Argentina where violence was considered a legitimate weapon for a large number of political actors. These young people were convinced that violence was a good thing; a short while later, the military would carry out a coup d’état based on the same concept; and Isabel Perón’s government also implemented an extremely violent program of repression of the left. It was a violent society, but all of that was seen as par for the course by masses of people. This is where I feel that while Argentina today has an infinite amount of problems, it’s not that often that you meet people who legitimize violence. But in my childhood, these young people were a good example of that violence.

J.C.R.: Let’s talk about the young militants who are the protagonists of the novel. How did these characters come about?

E.S.: The majority of these young people first began their association with leftist organizations in high school or university. Since I was thinking about two people who were friends since childhood, I decided that one would take the path of the ERP, and the other Montoneros. These were not enemy organizations, nor did they fight each other—they ran in parallel. This setup allowed me to have them criticize each other in their conversations and distance themselves from the other group’s party line. Between these two friends, Alejandro and El Cabezón, I also liked the idea of one of them having more conviction, being more sure of himself, more determined, and the other one being more full of doubt—I have the sense that when a person takes up the flag of an ideology, the certainty of it is soothing. In anything, not just in politics, doubt leads a person to a more agonizing place, although that’s more interesting to me. So they make life-and-death decisions because they puff themselves up as these ultimate judges: So-and-so deserves to be kidnapped, while this other guy deserves to die. Zealots believe this is the way things are, period, but the other character does not feel that way. This affords the reader an escape from ideological claustrophobia. That’s why Cabezón is full of doubt: why did we choose this person? Something that has always given me pause is this thing about choosing someone and deciding they’re the enemy, and that’s what Cabezón wonders at one point: why are we against this person? What makes them worse? No, it’s simply because they’re close by.

J.C.R.: And that’s exactly it—you develop your characters without a Manichean vision…

E.S.: I don’t tell you who is good and who is bad. I have my own ideas about it, but that doesn’t matter. The novel came out this past June in Argentina, and I’ve already gotten feedback from readers. A journalist asked me what my position was. I asked her, “What’s your position?” Her view was much more sympathetic to these two young people. In another interview I had, the journalist clearly had a very critical view towards them, and it seems like a good thing to me that both these journalists thought the novel was good. There are things that we cannot agree on, but we can at least read the same things, because sometimes it seems as if art has to subordinate itself to our preconceived notions, and I don’t like that. This whole thing about “I can only read people who say things I ascribe to” is not a good thing. But be careful: if as a reader I feel I am being given a sermon from a position that is too far removed from mine, I don’t like that either, and I put up a wall against it.

J.C.R.: Which of the characters is closest to your heart?

E.S.: I identify most with two characters. One is the father of one of the protagonists. This father does not agree with his son’s ideas. He believes the idea of revolution will fail and his son will die. He says to his son, “In this, you and I are alike: we both have dreams that will never happen. The difference is that I know it.” The other character is Mónica, the daughter of professor Mendiberri. This is a university professor who is purposely not constructed like the stereotypical radical professor, and he is further away from events. He is a geologist who is mainly interested in the Earth’s crust, but a string of mishaps puts him in the crosshairs of the authorities. All that matters to him is rocks, so he is completely alienated from what is going on around him, but his daughter isn’t. I imagine being a witness to the dangers and being unable to do anything about it. In regards to the tragic inexorability of events, it must have been grueling. This is a character I identify with a lot.

Translated by Slava Faybysh

Photo: Argentine author Eduardo Sacheri.