The body asks us for simple stories. We are programmed to understand a handful of narratives that lull us and reassure us: they were handsome and they loved each other; he was young and died; he was brave and stood up to the bad guys. Everything that goes up from here leaves us a little perplexed.
That is why the world embraced the story of the four brothers from Colombia with passion so it was known that they had appeared alive after forty days alone in the jungle. Somewhere in the world, that same day, someone was commissioned to start writing a script on the subject. Or self-assigned the task, sure.
“I can’t understand that someone can write fiction when what happens in real life is so surprising”, says Nora Ephron in a short piece of the book Tinc un coll que fa pena (The Other/ Asteroid) which is also a chronicle of how he had a good time writing journalism.
Every story, Ephron explains with juicy examples of her own (in which, she explains, a college scandal she covered for a magazine, there’s food, sex, unceremonious firings), is 300% more interesting when you approach it and scratch a little
Without any intention of contradicting Ephron, I can understand someone writing fiction and I am infinitely grateful for it because the day I become one of those people who say they don’t read novels anymore with age I will go and find the cyanide capsule.
In the story of the children of Colombia, everything got complicated so the journalists started doing their job: they investigate the father of the two older girls for sexual abuse of one of his daughters and violence against the dead mother. It is likely that the children, led by the eldest, Lesly, deliberately ignored the messages they heard from the rescuers because they were afraid of the dark green uniforms, as the family, according to the stepfather, had apparently been beaten by ‘a splinter faction of the FARC.
Those who stopped reading about the subject on the first day certainly also got something valuable, a simple and “heartwarming” story, as the English say. But those who have moved on have something better, something complex and viscous and life-like.
