César Pérez Gellida (Valladolid, 1974) is a highly successful author, since Memento mori (Suma, 2013), recently brought to television, where he explores and displays a world inhabited by people who are, for thousands of readers, great ( and fearful or tremendous) known. From that trilogy, which continued with Dies irae and Consummatum, comes Armando Lopetegui, a criminal psychologist, to whom another author would have dedicated a single and exclusive novel. And Carapocha (as he is called) collaborates closely with another great: Ramiro Sancho, Valladolid police officer. And the world around them, living and dead. And the bad guy, the evil and his analysis in third and first person.
But there will be more beings and wonders in his following novels, with their very unique particular characteristics. Either way, you have to submit to the whip of his writing. Not all lovers of the police genre are related to this aspect, in which this gentleman who graduated in Geography and History is an ace: vertigo, a stark story always on the edge, without ignoring his multiple concerns (be it the Balkans or what remains of the Cold War). Jon Sistiaga affirms that Pérez Gellida looks at fear and through fear. He sees what no one wants to see. In the previous film We grow the dwarfs (Suma, 2022), a criminal prolongs his victim’s agony as well as his sexual ecstasy. Not only here does Pérez Gellida give prominence to the most disadvantaged and exploited women of this land.
And it seems that with this Nadal award-winning work – in which there is something that I don’t fit in, puristically speaking; or who knows if even puritanically speaking – he takes revenge. To do this, it has been based on a true story, that of an attractive and lethal woman who ended up with a series of husbands and suitors and the like. This is how he builds this elusive widow, a girl raised in a circus who suffers a horrible attack. And then she reinvents herself: she changes her Slavic name to Antonia Monterroso. And in 1917, with Europe shaken, in the harsh land of Extremadura she starts from scratch and achieves everything. All.
There is something mestizo that I do not understand in the novel, which on the other hand has the vertigo and tempo of his previous books. Perhaps it is the figure of this formidable dominator who holds everyone by the penis: the captain of the Civil Guard, the foreman of his farm… and before that the owner of the bakery whom he cajoles as he will with all the clients. But on this mammoth woman with false teeth – I have wondered if the detail of her surgeries in the dentist’s chair was necessary – is superimposed the whole truth of a Spain that has lost Cuba and the Philippines, that of these same heroes who went through the worst and now they fall into the clutches of a woman who borders on the improbable. Although, as the author generously tells at the end, it did exist. And also its grave of dead.
In other words: there are many faces of evil that this narrative phenomenon called Pérez Gellida has looked in the face. But my mind, at times, in the runs through the field, clung to the only whole being in that story, the horse Alaric. There are extraordinary episodes, in the bullring, with Belmonte, or when the widow drinks her medicine in Seville.
Sometimes this Nadal award (and I cannot ignore it: the one that Delibes and Martín Gaite won) seems like a work by Tarantino. Others a race where the Extremadura shown is, pardon the pun, so extreme that it disappears in its famine and injustice and one forgets that it is the Spain that two decades later will end up in the worst scenario. Or to know – and I sincerely want the reader to judge this – if what appears when the jaws of a pig are opened is either genius or simple desire that, from the beginning, one prepares for the ferocity that will ensue. looms
