Eduardo
Mendicutti had a wonderful surprise saved up for us, one of
the best that any editor may hope for: the unexpected remittance of the
manuscript Fuego de marzo (March
Fire), a splendid book of short stories which reads like a novel because
each story is progressively brought to life by the same anonymous narrator in
chronological development, and because the reader, having finished the book,
will have unravelled a moving evocation
of puberty.
The surprising, almost unprecedented element of these
stories is that, although conceived over almost twenty years (1976-1995), they
manage to form an astonishingly coherent narrative. In fact, although each
story has its own rhythm and treatment, characters, places, words, and
situations recur in each of them like
choruses sprouting from the memory of youth, mutually explaining and
enriching one another.
Fuego de marzo tells of the experiences of a child
between the ages of ten and thirteen who, guided by his inquisitive gaze, leads
us through the memory of his discoveries.
The discovery of a way of being and feeling; the discovery of differences be
they social, emotional, erotic, esthetic, familiar, racial or vital; in short,
the discovery of the burns caused by a time as “terrible and pious as the fire of March”.
Some may relate these stories to El palomo cojo (TheLlimping Pigeon), a novel by Mendicutti which we published in 1991
and which has now been made into a film
by Jaime de Armiñán. But just as in
the novel, the claustrophobic setting favours the child’s introspective
monologue. Fuego de marzo is set in exteriors and the voice of the
child-adolescent is changeable and multiple, as if impregnated with the fears
which the very experiences of life have caused in him.
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