Gambusino (Plover Contemporary Latin-American Classics In English Translation Series)

Gambusino (Plover Contemporary Latin-American Classics in English Translation Series)

Product Description The story of a Mexican mining prospector and his run-ins with an American refining company. A tale of corruption and economic colonialism. From Library Journal Winner of Mexico City-based El Nacional's 50th-anniversary novel contest, this second novel by Montemayor (Blood Relations, LJ 4/15/95) is the richly poetic tale of an itinerant miner. Alfredo Montenegro is a gambusino, one of those seekers of deposits hidden as if at the end of dreams. Narrated by a poet and lifelong friend of Alfredo, the novel moves between past and present, encompassing nearly 40 years of Alfredo's struggle to find the ultimate strike. While vividly depicting the poverty of rural Mexico, Montemayor has a larger, more existential goal in mind. Alfredo's quest is ultimately everyone's; defining himself by his perseverance in the face of futility, he uncovers the mysteries of the self and of life. Recommended for all collections of Latin American literature.?Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. GambusinoBy Carlos MontemayorPlover PressCopyright 1997 Carlos MontemayorAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780917635243Chapter One The PastIn Villa Ocampo Alfredo Montenegro knew the fury of the mines. For him the odor of carbide was familiar, the roar of cave-ins, the suffocating heat of the shafts and the galleries, the water which rotted the earth, the boots, men's lungs. He'd also learned from his father to compete with the gambusinos, those seekers of deposits hidden as if at the end of dreams, that vanished or crystalized, subject only to the yoke of persistence. In Villa Ocampo he saw the natives who worked in the mines crossing the town as if they were far off and had no knowledge of the mining. Through them he'd learned about death for the first time while still a child when his father's helper Jacinto died. Before he found Jacinto shrouded and stretched out on the floor crosswise to the ceiling beams, below which the natives drank among the flowers and candles, he had seen him alive, lying on the ground on top of blankets. Jacinto had opened his eyes to look at him, and Alfredo had seen the eyes, which were large and red, move across his face without stopping. He'd drawn closer and taken hold of a long, calloused hand and managed to feel a small tremor in it. Jacinto, he said. Jacinto! he cried. It was the first time he had known silence, that between his hands, in spite of his young age, the world was anchoredin silence. A year later his mother brought him to Parral, and there they stayed for a full year in his grandparents' house. Often he and I went with Pastor Ramirez to the old house where Methodist services were held. The odor of flowers, readings from the Bible, the flocks of goats from Palestine, slowly covered my life also. Occasionally Alfredo would explain the versicles as signs of his own destiny: In the plain of Jordan did the king cast them, in the clay ground between Succoth and Zarthan. And Solomon left all the vessels unweighed, because they were exceeding many: neither was the weight of the brass found out. He knew that Succoth and Zarthan were nothing like Villa Ocampo, or anywhere near here, but he had a premonition that the light and the clean earth which he saw the first time he went with Jacinto to the old mine shafts in Villa Ocampo were the same as those between Succoth and Zarthan. And he visualized smelting in terms of the things his father taught him: the lead burning as it fell in the natural molds of the earth, like the tears of the world. His grandfather died when we were very small. I only remember a night at the railway station: an enormous silhouette, a reddish face leaning over him. When we were twelve his grandmother died. Alfredo and I were there when Pastor Ramirez gathered with three or four Methodist families on a cold gray February day i