Literature almost always offers solutions to narrate events that excite us, overwhelm us or even those with which we can maintain a certain distance, this last case is not that of Víctor Bello, who this Thursday presented his short novel The Old Sailor in Yaiza, which could have been an essay or any other genre, but which the author prefers to describe as “an interaction between reality and fiction” to share his thoughts on a phenomenon, such as migration, very present in the history of humanity, and of course, of the Canary Islands.
The writer and historian told in Yaiza the events that prompted him to sit down and write this story starring two powerful characters, none other than the American writer Ernest Hemingway and the Lanzarote sailor Gregorio Fuentes, “who landed in Cuba as an unaccompanied immigrant minor.”
Víctor Bello saw one afternoon while walking how a boat arrived at the coast of the city of Arrecife rescued by the maritime rescue services while a group of people took selfies with the boat and its occupants in the background. There he perceived the “naturalization of the drama.”
Based on that strong and close reality, his background as a historian and the investigative experience that led him to Uruguay to locate records on Lanzarote immigration in the Eastern Republic commissioned by the Lanzarote Film Festival, the author began to weave his story in the absence of finding a fact that would allow him to connect his fiction with so many components of reality.
He found it, by chance, in Gregorio Fuentes, a Lanzarote character who emigrated to Cuba and whom destiny would unite with Hemingway in an emergency situation at sea. “Gregorio Fuentes helped save a ship where Hemingway was during a storm between Cuba and Florida, and then the writer asked him to be the captain of his ship.”
From that relationship that ended in friendship, in fact in Hemingway's biography the name of Gregorio Fuentes appears, Víctor Bello found the link he needed to fictionalize reality. The story of The Old Man and the Sea is set in 1949, in the Gulf of Mexico, “not in the Gulf of Trump”, amid laughter, on a fishing day for friends Hemingway and Fuentes.
With this quick-reading book that is already in its third edition, Víctor Bello offers us his literary proposal to “demystify immigration”, remembering that from Lanzarote there were people who had to emigrate due to drought or the devastating eruptions of 1700, so the Island has not been oblivious to a phenomenon that is now on everyone's lips. “What I narrate is the feeling of the immigrant.” The Councilor for Culture of Yaiza, César Rijo, thanks the author for his visit to the municipality “to give us a fascinating literary encounter within the framework of the cultural program for the month of February.”