21 March 2009

LGG: "A Muerte"

A young montonero is mortally wounded in combat with royalist forces. As he flees from the battlefield, he is found by his lover, a young woman of native ancestry. She carries him to safety, although the effort causes her to have to stop multiple times. Finally, she brings him to a cavern, one into whose walls appear to have been carved iconography of the people who lived on the land before the arrival of the Spanish.

It's harrowing, dying-in-the-jungle element reminds me a bit of Quiroga's "A la deriva," though that is a story of a man dying alone. There's also some degree of the same ambiguous supernaturalism that shows up in "Castigo." Though not a horror story, it's certainly horrific, especially right at the end.

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