El Cid de Pérez-Reverte is the reduction of the statuary character to the minute of the bonfire to shelter and errancy. The "dust, sweat and iron" Machadiano is explained in such a way that the rider knows how much the stings caused by friction with the chair hurt or how it numbs the night cold that happens to the atrocious heat of the Castilian steppe. Even erotic yearnings visit him when he is alone. Chew a dried jerky from which it is easy to assume that there is no tooth to tear it.

The Cid of exile is a ronin , a sword with rental rate. The waitress, contained by the discipline and by the blind faith in the one who commands - "I will be watching you", the Cid tells them before entering battle, and that is enough - seems to degrade towards banditry, as often happens with the defeated that remain together, although it comes from living great deeds of those who put and remove kings. Some historical, such as the site of Zamora and the murder of treason of Sancho . Other legendary, as probably the Jura of Santa Gadea. These facts, intertwined in the memory with the daily dirt and the loot greed of the wanderers in arms, gives that game a historical dimension that makes its fall into disgrace even more dramatic and that the centaurs of John Ford lacked by Pérez referred to -Reverte when he announced that with Cid he was going to make a western.

That's where the real great character of this book arises: the Border. Specifically, the Douro border, a false porous, unstable limes, where languages ​​are mixed and bastardized, where the enemy of one day is the ally of the next, where Christians also kill each other sometimes in the service of a taifa and nothing corresponds to the Manichean vision of the Reconquest. As in the American Frontier, the Christian avant-garde is made up of tiny rock castles that are like the cavalry forts. And farmers, pioneers willing to look for a life in a dangerous place, which does not reach the authority or the law, and where they are hunting trophies of the games of looters, the aceiphs.

Become a western character, El Cid palpates dung to see how far the persecuted are and speaks of the Moors as if they were Apaches. Just as invisible, just as fearsome when they fall on a farm, a village or a monastery and they fill everything with eschatological death. Although then the historical track emerges, the background. As when the Cid, recognizing the uniform and tattoos of a dead man, is surprised to see the Almoravids, the rigorist, jihadist tribes so far north that they passed from Africa to take advantage of the relative Andalusian laxity after fragmentation into taifa .

Beyond its plot peculiarity, this is another one of those novels in which Pérez-Reverte filters his own internal war wounds. A crossbowman from Castilla is a resource to remember a sniper from Sarajevo. The obsession to tell the smells, those of death and those of the soldiery, belongs to the one who brings those of war attached to the memory. In the same way that it seems to be the same swarm of flies that has been going for thousands of years to feed on open guts, which are always the same open guts. Mixed in the author the investigator and the reporter, the result is a journalist's work embedded in the exile's hosts that justify the Cid su Cantar . And where the facts prelude the Levantine apotheosis of a representative of that Spanish low nobility who still had everything to do and did it with the sword. And that, half a millennium later, he jumped to America because here the borders had run out.

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