where horses die

Tannin was the final product of La Forestal. The story is well known: the company that dominated and exploited the Chaco forest, north of Santa Fe, during the first half of the last century. Far away? Rather, still fresh. Ghost alive in the dispossession and in the will of contemporary forest peoples to get ahead. “Tanino” takes place in this area, Pablo Cruz’s first novel, published by Contramar Editora.

As Santiago Venturini says on the back cover, “Tanino” begins with a disturbing fact: the appearance of dead animals in the streets and vacant lots of a town”. The first case is not investigated and is attributed to a brawl, a settling of scores ; the repetition activates the police investigation. The local commissioner has to solve the mystery of several horses killed by knives, found out there, as if viciously. The town is moved as if the matter touched a deep chord. Death comes again , this time to ruin the tourist activity that is sought with the Fiesta del Chivo, the latest collective initiative to win a mango.

The attention falls mainly on Robson and Vicky. Two foreigners who came to town for different reasons and yet are linked to relatives of workers and members of the factory. Daniel, Chamorrito and the commissioner complete the picture: a community, an imposing past, a gloomy present and a cut that can fall on any neck.

“Tanino” is a mystery novel that achieves a precise effect, the feeling of violence buried in an apparent triviality.

Cruz is a writer and photographer. He was born in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires, but grew up and lives in Santa Fe. It is no coincidence that a photo or image is enough for the characters in the novel to face an action. Cruz resorts to images bringing with them a memory, that duration of history in the present. He does not need to clarify it, and yet each word works on the memory of the forest peoples, from where that amber and somewhat ghostly tone comes.

The prose of “Tanino” is resonant, recovering local voices and expressions in other languages: from the bar, from the north, from Mocoví. It has the virtue of building a noir environment and sustaining it without overturning it in the fantastic or in the classic police. At times it shares the harsh tone of “Ladrilleros”, by Selva Almada. On other pages the humor of “The Way of Tobacco” by Erskine Cadwell resonates. In turn, “Tanino” is part of the works that work on the history of the north of Santa Fe, such as “Mount darkness” (Musa Rea), by María Sarmiento, “Talen!” (Contramar, 2017), by Amílcar Bo, and “Monte de Silences” (Colihue, 2018), by Alicia Barberis.

In this first novel, Cruz shows a great ear for accents and ways of saying that don’t need too many words to express themselves. Therefore the story also works in the silences, in the unsaid, so that the readers have to make steps on their own, beyond the text, in the insinuated, as if stepping off the path a bit and sticking their heads into the mountain. Thus, it can be perceived that in the story there are also other characters, non-human, linked to nature and Mocoví spirituality, wounded by our way of living.

The reading of “Tanino” then allows us to see these intertwined dimensions: the memory of La Forestal, the populations that today live in the town and the presence of the mountain. The narrator proposes movements and points of view to do it. One of the most beautiful is Chamorrito’s attempt to find a place without an owner: a tree and a piece of ground. The prose becomes minimal to find that moment in which Chamorrito “practices stillness” in order to gain the trust of a bird. After a while a cardinal approaches and climbs onto the hand. The fragility of the scene makes it disturbing, but it also has some hope. He gives the feeling that, if he doesn’t attack him, that world that was once an immense jungle will come back.

“Tanino” is the title of the book and somehow it works as a gateway to a memory. This is also the name, for example, of the popular library of La Gallareta, which has records from the time, a community radio station and other collective initiatives that claim and discuss the history of the forest peoples. For these communities, memory is not a paralysis in the past that disables attempts to forge a different future. On the contrary, it is a fund that seeks to overcome the pedaling in the void that caused the parastatal operation of La Forestry in the area and that is often perceived in the stories of the elders, when progress is put back in the ’50s and in the present a pain.

The novel works within the scope of a question: what does the history of La Forestal teach us today? It is a complex issue that, of course, summons different approaches, and does not stop producing readings on progress, the dispossession and extraction of natural resources, workers’ resistance, human rights. In this sense, the historian Alejandro Jasinsky works, who recovers the workers’ revolts to account for the organization to defend the worker and the oppression of the company.

The perspective of memory is a way of putting human rights at the center of the debate about the future, thinking of it as a right and not as an imposed destiny.

From April to July, Pablo Cruz exhibited at the Museum of the Constitution of Santa Fe, together with Celeste Medrano, the work “A la deriva (memories that are rivers, rivers that are memories)”. In the description they ask themselves: “What is memory if not a permanent search, a finding that leaves us, the seed of a future?” The visit of the installation proposed to question the unified narrative around the Constitution with images that come from the river and the island.

In this sense, “Tanino” is a fiction that dialogues with the initiatives involved in thinking of a different future for the forest towns, but also one for the city, already constituted, already traced and distributed. Without hesitation, he takes us out like someone who goes out to the island and lets his gaze float through the landscape until the arrogance of the city is suspended: “As they approached the coast, what seemed like a single block of vegetation began to differentiate in different layers of gray. They left a few ridges behind, the first alder trees appeared. Daniel slowed down, the boat stopped planing and turned south carried by a barely perceptible current. The water changed color. Right in the mouth! shouted Chamorrito. They went up, after the alders appeared the largest trees: ingás, laurels, timbos. Now the two albardones that encased the stream were well defined. A trunk drifted down, Daniel slowed down again. The engine of the boat was regulating. Suddenly it stopped”.

Pablo Cruz (1972), born in Santa Fe in Avellaneda, province of Buenos Aires, has a degree in Communication Sciences (UNER). He lives and works in Santa Fe. As a visual artist he exhibited both individually and collectively in regional and national salons. He attends the writing clinic coordinated by Selva Almada and, in 2018, he was a finalist in the EMR Nouvelle Contest. “Tanino” is his first short novel.