The Book of Nonexistent Words by Stefano Massini

Author:Stefano Massini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperVia
Published: 2021-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

It’s the year of our Lord 1536 and we are about to make a journey through Peru to the Chilean region of Araucanía. Over the previous years a mighty Spanish army had pushed south from Panama in search of the legendary El Dorado. It was led by two ruthless warriors, Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro. The first passed into history as the famous conquistador of the Inca Empire, but we are more interested in the second, whom Pizarro humiliated with a lesser role. Almagro never forgave him.

And this was the fuse that fired the cannon, since there is always some remote inkling of injustice in those who are then condemned to curse their own existence. Almagro was a small, stocky man of unprepossessing appearance whose features were much blemished by the first expeditions among the insalubrious islands of Ecuador—indeed he lost an eye, and it was only by a miracle that he survived infection, monsoons, assorted snakebites, and thousands of native arrows. All the same, he didn’t give up. It could be said that the goddess Atë, circling above, had sown an unhealthy seed of revenge, such as to turn him to chronic violence, frayed by an unquenchable thirst for conquest. But what conquest? He and Pizarro had crushed the wealthy empire of Atahualpa. They now shared a vast power, which until then must have seemed unimaginable. And yet Almagro was tormented by a sense of frustration that urged him never, never, never to stop. It wasn’t greed; it was much worse. Certain people spend their whole lives wandering about with no clear destination: theirs is a chaotic floundering, a hundred times more tiring than swimming, where everything is condensed into laying claim to something about which they know nothing and wish to know nothing because it’s enough for them to rant and rave that it’s not there. They might tell themselves that they’ve missed something, and in this delirium they glimpse a shadow of their own existence. Such people are reduced to bestiality without being any more animal than we all are, our instincts generally leading us to satisfy our obvious and basic needs. Almagro, on the other hand, seemed like a spinning top in the hands of one of those capricious young children who yell for the sake of yelling, regardless of whether they are tired or hungry. Well, exactly. He had been yelling for years without making a sound and had become dazed by the deafening echo of that yelling inside his skull, passing sleepless nights thinking up the worst anathemas against himself, against Pizarro, against accursed Peru and the wretched human condition. If he had been an Inuit, his isolation from the Utku would have been banishment for life. Goodwill was now alien to him, having become a war machine with no other purpose than to use his power and his gold to achieve a status almost divine, total and unreachable. It was in this frame of mind that he headed south in 1536 from

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