• Coronavirus: Luis Sepúlveda dies at 71

The one Luis Sepúlveda wanted to look like was his great-uncle Ignacio Kallfukurá, to tell Mapuche children at sunset and by the river stories where foxes, pumas, condors and 'wigña', the wild cat, spoke.

Luis Sepúlveda was also considered a raccoon, which means People of the Earth. And in Araucanía, Wallmapu, the country of the People of the Earth, located Story of a dog named Lea '(Tusquets) in 2016. By then he was the age of his great-uncle when he listened to him fantasize.

Sepúlveda always smiled and never stopped talking . Neither in the long aftermath, about 20 years ago, of a meal in a restaurant by the Madrid square of Callao, which was approaching at dinner time while continuing and continuing to tell anecdotes. The group ended up approaching diners from other tables attracted by his grace and a waiter who stood up to follow those adventures without end. The last time I saw him at the Barajas airport; going to or coming from Lisbon. The same smile, the same teeth.

Listening or saying Sepúlveda is equivalent to An old man who read love novels (Tusquets, 1993), the novel that broke his seams and has made so many happy . Luis Sepúlveda had something of Antonio José Bolívar Proaño, the man who, after the death of his wife, Dolores Encarnación del Santísimo Sacramento Estupiñán Otavalo, went into the jungle, to the country of the Shuar, the Indians whom some call jíbaros who "hunted tapirs, gummies, capybaras, saínos, monkeys, birds and reptiles ". With them "he learned to use the blowgun, silent and effective in hunting, and the spear in front of the fast fish."

He was one of them without being one. Antonio José Bolívar Proaño listened astonished how the Shuar ("friendly as a herd of monkeys, talkative as the drunk parrots and screaming as the devils") sang aments , nasal poems that described the joy of pleasure and maintained the habit of only staying three years in one place, taking with them their huts and the white bones of their ancestors. Even more so when colonists arrived promising a new happiness based on whiskey in exchange for land so that the cattle and the wood business would expand beyond any border. With them, the gold diggers. Thus, mixing reality and fantasy, the splendid pages of an old man advance .

It was in El Dorado, a town of about a hundred houses by the river, with a police station, church and school, where Antonio José Bolívar Proaño approached after several days of canoeing after completing 40 years in the jungle . After reading the 50 books that the teacher had, she discovered that she only liked one, The Rosary of Florence Barclay. "The characters suffered and mixed happiness with suffering in such a beautiful way that the magnifying glass was clouded with tears."

The old man read aloud, slowly and repeated the phrases he liked until they stole their meaning. He read day and day until the books were exhausted. Twice a year, El Idilio, the town where he lived, brought those misadventures to Dr. Rubicundo Loachamín, a dentist who dragged a portable barber chair. The toothpick adjusted the price of the dentures after having euthanized the patient and insulted him in the middle of the job: "Sit down and show that you have the eggs well put". A montubio was allowed to remove the entire denture for a bet: one gold nugget per piece, healthy or eaten . Antonio José Bolívar Proaño only used his own to eat and sleep, the rest of the day he kept it wrapped in a handkerchief.

In that jungle of boas and parrots, parrots and saínos, of long rainy seasons and of machete in hand, the old man had to go inside reading love novels to recover the body of a man killed by a triguillo, a bold and intelligent feline refined that everyone was suspicious of. "If tracing is too easy and makes you feel confident, it means the triguillo is looking at the back of your neck." Alone and among the thicket that tabby animal and the old man face each other at the end of a priceless novel for any day of the year, for any moment.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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