Mil y una muertes

In these pages the photographer Castellón is born, lives and dies, one of the most attractive and enigmatic characters in recent Latin American literature. The reader will see through the lens of his camera the hallucinating falsification of our nationalities, the defeated fantasy of ideals and utopias, the most persisting being the Nicaragua canal, the genius’s bidding and the misery in various planes, from the port of Greytown in Nicaragua, with its marbled palaces in the middle of the jungle, to the Warsaw ghetto and to the Cartuja Monastry in Mallorca.

The mercenary Walker, King Mosco, Queen Victoria, the short Napoleon, Archduke Luis Salvador and his strange entourage, Flaubert, Turgenev and George Sand, without forgetting to mention Chopin—all come to live here, along with the outrages pen of Vargas Vila and the flowery prose of Rubén Darío.