María Margarita, a young woman who lives in a mining town in the heart of the Chilean Atacama desert in the 1960s, has had the gift of telling movies since she was a child.
When a film starring Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper or Charlton Heston, or a Mexican feature packed with songs, arrives in the local village cinema, the exact change for a ticket is collected at María's house and she is sent to watch it. When María returns from the cinema, she tells the movie to her father, confined to a wheelchair, and to her four siblings, and soon she is telling the movie to a large and impatient public.
Through this tender story, Hernán Rivera Letelier gives us the magical tale of village cinemas in their times of splendor - and of decadence.
Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
Release date:
November 2, 2023
Publisher:
Quercus Publishing
Print pages:
144
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I remember, when my mother was still with us – before the accident – and we were a proper family and my father was working (and not drinking so much), and she used to welcome him with a kiss when he came home from work, I remember how the seven of us would go to the cinema together.
I just loved the whole ritual of getting ready to go to the cinema!
“They’re showing an Audie Murphy movie tonight,” my father would say when he got home (at the time, you went to see a movie because of who was in it). Then we would put on our best clothes. Shoes as well. My mother would comb my brothers’ hair using lemon juice instead of brilliantine, and give them a parting so straight it looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. Apart, that is, from Marcelino, brother number four; his hair was as coarse as horsehair, and however much she combed it, it always stood up on his head like the pages of an open book. She would make me a ponytail, my hair tied back so tightly with black elastic bands that my eyes would almost bulge.
We always went to the early-evening performance.
I loved that too, because, for me, the evening was the loveliest time on the pampa. The last rays of sun turned the rusty corrugated-iron roofs to gold, and the twilight colours matched the silk scarves my mother wore.
She adored those silk scarves.
As was usual on the pampa, we would walk down the middle of the dirt street towards the red clouds of the sunset. My father, who always walked along arm-in-arm with Mama, would say hello to all the men he passed.
“Good evening, Maestro Castillo!”
“Good evening, Maestro so-and-so.”
I noticed that, although they spoke to him, they had eyes only for my mother. She was very young and pretty, you see, and swayed her hips like the actresses in the movies.
When we reached the corner where the cinema was, we would hear the music from the old loudspeakers, and our hearts would fill with joy. Outside, there would be stalls selling sweets and toys. For her and my papa, my mother used to buy a packet of Pololeo mints with romantic messages on them and for each of us a cone of sweet popcorn.
We were nearly always the first to go in.
7
We weren’t like the other people who waited for the first chords of the march to strike up – the signal that the movie was about to start – before flocking into the au. . .
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