Perdido
Описание книги
Madewell Brown walked into the village on a hot, dry day in 1946. A solitary black man with one arm longer than the other, he had never found a place for himself. Never, that is, until he had painted his own history on the interior walls of his adobe house in Guadalupe.Fifty years later, Will Sawyer’s truck runs out of gas, and as he walks that same long road back into town he knows it’s best to keep his eyes on the ground. But he doesn’t understand the town’s long history of displacement or the difficulty of truly fitting in there, until he hears the story of the dead girl found hanging from Las Manos Bridge.In Perdido, Rick Collignon returns to the same magical village he first introduced in The Journal of Antonio Montoya.In Perdido, Collignon returns to the same magical town he first introduced in The Journal of Antonio Montoya. Once again mixing present and past, living and dead, he delivers a forthright and unflinching examination of race, belonging, and identity. With this novel, Collignon shows that a powerful new voice in American fiction has arrived.
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PeRdido
He came to Guadalupe from the south. The road was not paved then, and in the spring, when the ground thawed, it was not a road at all but only mud. On that day in July, with no rain, the man walked loosely on the hard-packed adobe, as though that were all he had ever done. He was tall and thin and carried a worn canvas bag over his shoulder. His dark clothes were baggy on his frame and too heavy for the season. The face shadowed beneath his cap was weathered and thick featured. He stared at the ground as he walked, as if he thought it might have something to say, although he was no longer interested in what that might be. At times, he would swing the bag off his shoulder and carry it in his right hand, as he was doing when the first person in Guadalupe saw him—a young boy named Gilfredo Vigil, who was in a field throwing rocks at his grandfather’s cows. Gilfredo could see that this man’s right arm hung four inches longer than his left and that the skin of his face and hands was black.
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Telesfor Ruiz, Will Sawyer’s only neighbor, died in his bed of old age just a year after Will came to Guadalupe. Telesfor lived in the adobe his father had built, a couple of hundred yards from Will’s house. After Telesfor’s death, his relatives, who no longer lived in Guadalupe, came and buried him. They emptied his house and his sheds, hauling away even the old man’s cookstove. They sold his sheep and three head of cattle to the Medina family. Then they boarded up the two small windows in the house, nailed shut the door, and went back to where they had come from. Will never knew what happened to Telesfor’s dog, which was small and twisted with age and no longer barked at anything.
The first time Will met Telesfor, he had been in Guadalupe only a few weeks and knew no one. He had spent that time alone, working on his house and wondering what he was doing in a place where people looked at you as if you weren’t there and almost always spoke in a language in which all the words sounded alike. One afternoon, he had walked to Telesfor’s house and found the old man sitting on a stool beneath his portal. Telesfor invited him inside for coffee, and they sat awkwardly at the kitchen table for a long time. Finally, as if from nowhere, Telesfor told him that one winter when he was a small boy, the snowfall had been so heavy that all of the roofs in Guadalupe collapsed on the same night. When he woke, he said, there was mud and water in his bed and he could not feel his feet. All he could see above him was falling snow and stars.
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