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MARCIO VELOZ MAGGIOLO: AWRITER OF ITALIAN DESCENT
alluded to in the text. Thus, the magical and musical revenge for the death of Honorio also serves as a con-
demnation of the ethnic purge referred to as “el corte” (the cut).
El hombre del acordeón
(The Man with the Accordion, 2003, the subject of critical studies by Sergio Callau,
José Rafael Lantigua, Rita de Maeseneer, Fernando Valerio-Holguín, Julie Sellers, Néstor Rodríguez, and oth-
ers) retrieves and extols the fascinating figure of the “rayano,”
1
one of the marginalized groups in the official
culture (still stained with
Trujillismo
), which find a noble space in Veloz Maggiolo’s writing, along with the
Black, the Haitian, the Indigenous, and the
campesino
. Furthermore, the author, as usual, masterfully employs
intertextual relationships with other discourses, from anthropology to history and from popular culture to
archaeology.
Novels such as
Florbella
and
La mosca soldado
(which have been dealt with by such scholars as Rafael
Rodríguez-Henríquez, Sergio Callau, Núria Sabaté Llobera, and Daniel Arbino) are nourished by emotions
and archaeological experiences. But we like to conclude with what is, until now, the last novel by Marcio
Veloz Maggiolo:
Navidad
(Christmas, 2016), subtitled
Memorias de un naufragio
(Memories of a Shipwreck),
which once again deals with history, distilled memories, and fantasy. It is dedicated to the first years of colo-
nial Hispaniola, after the landing of Christopher Columbus.
In the first chapter of the text, which is the longest, Nathaniel, seeking refuge in a Hieronymite monas-
tery in Seville, writes a long letter to his confessor, Fray Tomás de Abril, recounting his twelve-year adven-
ture in the Indies. Nathaniel is one of the three survivors of the annihilation of the Fuerte de la Navidad, the
first European settlement in the Americas, which Columbus built with materials from the wreck of the Santa
María. On his return during the second trip in 1493, he discovered that it had been destroyed and the inhab-
itants massacred by the indigenous people in revenge for the abuses of the constable Diego de Arana and the
other Spaniards. Apart from Nathaniel, only his uncle Luis de Torres—the Jewish expert on Middle Eastern
languages who was put in charge of learning and translating the native languages—and the gypsy Casilda—
who had embarked as the concubine of the cartographer Juan de La Cosa—manage to escape. They had all
taken refuge with the natives, and by 1505 they eventually succeeded in returning home.
We closely follow the vicissitudes of Nathaniel, a Maghrebi of short stature and very black hair, that the
Nuhuirey mistress Jariquena disguises as a Ciguayo with vegetable pigments to darken his skin, which was
already quite dark. He suffers the mutilation of half of his tongue by the Caonabo chief, so that he is unable to
tell anyone what happened. The subsequent pages are filled with many characters from those pivotal years:
Columbus and his family members, the rebel mayor Francisco Roldán, Fray Ramón Pané, Fray Bartolomé de
Las Casas, and the indigenous chiefs Anacaona, Guacanagarix, and others. But above all, Nathaniel learns the
manners, customs, and myths of the Taíno, practices the ritual ingestion of Cohoba, and manages to better
understand their beliefs and their worldview. For this reason, he sees the unjust cruelty of the persecution
of the natives by Columbus and other rulers. The narrative itself, which jumps from one event to another,
like a toa frog, vividly brings us back to the oldest conflict of cultures in the Americas, thereby reconstructing
the pulse of life and the intensity of emotions among the natives of the island, in a way that can only be done
by an author with an enormous knowledge of the pre-Columbian Caribbean. The objective of Nathaniel’s
detailed report is to return to Santo Domingo, with the help of the Hieronymites, to whom he will deliver
a part of the profit, because on the island his wife Jariquena, who is surely waiting for him, will reveal the
hiding place of the treasure buried in the Fuerte de la Navidad and never found.
From the end of the first chapter, and particularly in chapters II – IV, the tone of the book becomes less
subjective; the voices multiply; materials taken from the Archivo de Las Indias in Seville are included; and
the plot line becomes more accelerated and scattered, amid a haze of variations and with several theatrical
blows, that cast a grim light on Nathaniel’s claims and his final days. Indeed, his testimony is not believed:
the hidden treasure is considered a lie. The Taíno areito and cohoba and tobacco ceremonies are viewed as
satanic. Nathaniel feels like a “Taíno martyr.” Judged as a heretic by Fray Antonio de los Ángeles Custodios,
he is burned at the stake.