Police officer with political load

THE RED ONE IN THE PEN OF THE PARROT
By Daniel Chavarría-(Mondadori)-367 pages-($ 27)

The confluence of two separated police cases of very diverse nature and in the time by a pair of decades molds the frame of this novel of Daniel Chavarría, born in Uruguay in 1933 and been in Cuba from 1969 after to have passed by diverse countries of Latin America and Europe. Some of their several previous novels were finalists in international prizes (like Good bye Boys , name for a Edgar in the United States, 1998), others were awarded, like There they , whom Hammet received in 2001 the Dashiell prize. The red one in the pen of the parrot obtained the one of House of the Américas. In his present country of residence, the author has worked like university professor of Greek and Latin Literature, translator and scriptwriter of cinema and television.

The narration by the end of begins like a peculiar history of love in Havana the Nineties. There Aldo Bianchi, an Argentinean of fifty and five years who has grown in Italy from a first lucky marriage in the money but not in the love, is redeemed sexually by a mulata and twentyish jinetera, Bini, for scandal of a marriage friend of him, made up of an Argentine professor and a Cuban psychiatrist.

The tracks around the corpse of a cyclist hasty and left by the involuntary person in charge of the fact lead, after an investigation filled with meanders, to another fiftyish one settled down in Cuba, of name Alberto Ri'os, that also has frequented the ardent services of Bini. The mulata has been vehicle not only of the sexual.redemption of Bianchi but also, accidentally, of his encounter with a dark personage of its past.

The such Alberto Ri'os must in fact that name to an obtained false passport in Argentina (under the presidency of Menem), thanks to the management of an old colleague his in the Mechanics school of the Navy, where that one, in fact an instructed Uruguayan torturador in its country and the United States, had served theoretical and practical during the military dictatorship, and it had become rich with collateral benefits of such activities.

On that frame, interlaced with police investigations and judicial performances present and memories of passed facts, the loving and friendly ups and downs of Aldo are tiled Bianchi with those of the enterprise and gymnastic life of "Rivers", once "Captain Horror", in freedom first and the jail later. And such ups and downs are those that really take the greater space of this novel, written in a prosa of deliberate self-confidence, dyed of humor, with mixture of cubanismos and argentinismos, pleasant and light, almost always functional, basically put to the service of the puzzle of the plot.