sea's face 
monkey's face , Richard Curci (Macedonia, 2010, 204 pages).
By José María Marcos (*)
A well-known medieval legend, attributed to St. Augustine, a theologian has paced the shore thinking of the mystery of creation. In the midst of solitude, he saw a child drawing water from a cup, over and over again, and put it in a hole. Curious, the bishop came over and asked what he was doing. The boy replied that he was trying to keep all the sea in the well. The priest told him that was impossible, so the child he said: "Even more difficult is to decipher the mystery of God through a human mind." Argentine writer Ricardo
Curci, in
's face monkeys, do not try to unravel the mystery of God, but, yes, seeks to investigate the primitive that lies at the bottom of the human soul and that usually manifests in extreme situations thanks to the paranoia, dementia, or disposal. Ancestor of
The Homes and intermediate beings, this new book completes a kind of triptych of interconnected stories, with characters and scenes that appear and disappear with great ease. However, unlike their predecessors, central monkey's face is not supernatural, but the staging of the latent violence.
From the start, with the story "The Sea", the author makes us aware of what will arguably, with a murderer who is tired of his wife. And, also, raises the overall theme of the book: "The beach stretched huge and empty, windy spring. The waves, gray, pearl, fell over one another breaking on the beach, licking the sand and then return and merge into the new waves continually engendered. "
In the eighteen stories in this collection (a finalist in the Casa de las Americas Prize in Cuba 2008) many characters overwhelmed by their limitations and disturbances. Perhaps because, as in "Asylum", the sea is a threat and may even build on a graveyard and dig up the dead to show their ferocity and "the futility of life."
This obsession permeates the story and appears as if readers were in a beach watching a show forever. Another example of this fascination lies in "spa", "His voice was dark, the water was cold as the sea at dusk when the sun goes down and a cool breeze and unfriendly tells us not to enter, because we leave sea \u200b\u200bis closing in on itself. The sea is silent and is silent and not talk to humans. Something bigger is coming after dark, another life comes or comes from somewhere and are expelled with chills and an uncertain concern. Anything can happen then, the beach is emptied of people and the sea has become an inhospitable host who sows stones and creates teeth under water. " Associated with the endless succession of cycles and the transience of life, the sea is a very mythic element present even in the oldest stories in a religious interpretation, a legendary and supernatural. As God is incomprehensible. To Curci, as inexplicable as the human soul. And faced with this immense stands the word, because, as the Italian Alessandro Baricco, when you have a name for naming things, then the stories are born.
(*) Ezeiza's Word, page 6, Thursday January 13, 2011.
