“Lorenzo looked at the reddened horizon (…) Nothing worried him as much as the line on the horizon, because they would surely reach the end of the world and fall with everything and train into the abyss.” (2006:9). This is how Elena Poniatowska begins her novel “La Piel del Cielo”, winner of the 2001 Alfaguara prize. It is the beginning of an uncertain journey for two children Lorenzo and Florencia.
It was the year 1958, when a young man who had recently graduated as a doctor embarked on a trip, not by his own decision, but by a bureaucratic arrangement. Arriving at an unknown place that didn’t even exist in your dreams. This is how Dr. Díaz Castañeda himself narrates, when he arrived in Valera by car, overwhelmed by years and kilometers, the young doctor, more scared than happy.
He entered the city that suddenly looked like a postcard, where the lots and pieces of hacienda gave steps to its growth. Who would have thought that that young man, full of uncertainties, would become an obligatory reference in the city of Doña Mercedes Díaz today. Because he is a Trujillo native at heart, as Don Francisco Omar Araujo consecrated him.
Valera in Wakefulness and in Sleep, is Dr. Raúl’s speech, when the city turned 160 years old. It is a synthesis of local history, it is not a summary, but a discourse of short literature, which is very difficult to construct, as the greats do. It reminded me of the synthesis capacity of our Arturo Uslar Pietri.
The aesthetics of the speech are great as the magic of the word emerges with the story. It highlights the icons of identity, architecture, geography, the evolution of institutions, the great characters, also the less prominent ones, but who do not allow themselves to be great because they are the city. It is Unamuno’s approach in intrahistory, to give it the voice of protagonism.
Valera describes the cobblestone streets, the meeting point, Plaza Bolívar, the old market, Radio Valera and Turismo, the Diario El Tiempo, Los Andes, the disappeared weekly newspaper, El Tubazo, which says: “Annoying and bad-tempered, whose tremendousness and bad breeding are nothing other than the expression of a different love for Valera, but love too.”
A highlighted curiosity is that of Manuel Sánchez Castaño. He is the first person to make the first trip by car from Trujillo to Caracas, in 1920. It lasted five days at a cost of two hundred bolivars. Another is that of Agueda González. It is said that he built the first house in the valley in 1810. A text to read and share accompanied by anecdotes.
Literature. DÍAZ CASTAÑEDA, Raúl. Valera in Wakefulness and in Sleep. Multicolor Editions. Valera – December 1980.
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2024-10-06 15:03:06
