Dolores Redondo points to the abyss and there it is, at her feet, the trail of horror. A scar in the middle of the Malerreka valley and 50 meters of free fall and historical shame. Seven bodies, eight if we count the son who was never born, and a witch hunt, never better said, in the middle of the Civil War. “Unless you receive news in the coming days that says otherwise, it is the most recent popular execution for witchcraft in the history of Spain,” reveals the writer. At your feet, the crime scene. The Legarrea chasm. The black hole into which Josefa Goñi Sagardía, six or seven months pregnant, and her six children were pushed in 1936. «It’s overwhelming. Think about pushing one person, let alone seven,” exclaims the author of the popular Baztán trilogy, five million copies sold and almost 40 translations around the world. In memory, an event reconstructed from rumor and legend and fixed in history when in 2016 the anthropologist and forensic scientist Paco Extebarría found the remains of Josefa and her children at the bottom of the cave. “They pointed a gun at them and forced them to jump into the chasm, and one by one they threw the children in the presence of the mother, and then forced her to jump after them,” we now read in ‘Those who don’t sleep NASH’ ( Destino), a work with which Redondo returns to kilometer zero of his emotional and literary world map, Elizondo, Elbete and surroundings, to continue exploring ancestral torments and mysteries and introduce a new heroine, the forensic psychologist Nash Elizondo. The book arrives this Wednesday in bookstores with a first print run of 220,000 copies in Spanish and another 20,000 in Catalan and, to present it as Basajaun commands, the Basque writer guides a large group of journalists through corners and settings of the novel . New points to mark in red those literary routes that have turned Aunt Engrasi’s house, the police station, or the old Baztanesa Panificadora, today the Matecadas Salazar workshop, into imposing tourist attractions. “In Elizondo I have realized that there is Dolores Redondo, who is me, and then Redondo, that writer that the people here already perceive as a character from Baztán,” he relativizes. Mortal beliefs It is Dolores and not Redondo who speaks now from the Legarrea chasm in Gaztelu, a sinisterly beautiful place that leads to a macabre discovery in the novel: that of the body of a young woman who had been missing for three years. «This place has dark karma. “It is not a cemetery, it is the scene of a crime,” he says. A fictional crime to establish a novel inspired and rooted in a real atrocity. «It never ceases to fascinate me that in these valleys that are precisely called The Tranquil Valleys there were people so attached to the beliefs on which I base my novels as to throw a pregnant woman and children of 14, 12, 9, 4 into a chasm. and 3 years and 18 months. “It’s stupid,” he insists. Once the frontist and civil war hypothesis has been discarded (“in that town everyone belonged to the same side,” he emphasizes), what remains is the fear of the other and blind faith. “Fear and superstition can also lead to killing,” says Redondo. Dolores Redondo continues with ‘Las que no dormen NASH’ by the Los Valles Tranquilos quartet CARLOS RUIZDe Josefa, for example, was said to be ‘belagilek’ and unleashed storms at your whim. Also that she was a beautiful ‘sorgiña’ with the ability to aojar and that she prepared potions. A witch, come on. With all the letters and in all languages. Only not, of course. It was just different. And poor. But above all different. Hence the title of a novel with which Redondo pays tribute to “that feminine restlessness that, for example in the Middle Ages, was immediately considered the cause of witchcraft.” «Women had to sleep at night because their more fragile soul, more permeable to evil and the influence of the evil one, was especially predisposed during the night, so the woman had to sleep or pray. Staying awake during the night has always been a symbol related to witchcraft, so the book is a tribute to those of us who did not go to sleep and stayed reading, inventing, thinking,” she explains. A tribute, he emphasizes, “to a concern that cost some their lives.” New quartet With ‘Las que no dormen NASH’, Dolores Redondo takes another step in the composition of what, now, has already been revealed with a new quartet, that of Los Valles Tranquilos. A series that began with ‘Waiting for the Deluge’ and whose third installment will be locked up to write the San Sebastian native at Christmas, as soon as the promotional round is finished. «It is not a saga, they are not novels that continue. I have looked for one more twist, since I believe that it is my obligation as a writer not only to tell a story, but to try to tell it in a different way. I cannot reveal what the motto or dogma of this quartet is, because it is something that I want to be discovered book by book, but I do know that they are all part of the same Dolores Redondo universe and of that genre that I inaugurated with ‘The Invisible Guardian’ », he summarizes. The author of ‘The North Face of the Heart’ refers to that mixture of police investigation, legends of Baztán and brutal crimes with which her best-selling legend has been forged. A cocktail to which is now added the stellar appearance of Amaia Salazar and the emergence of Dr. Nash Elizondo, a forensic psychologist with whom Redondo allows himself to tension the intrigue from a different perspective. “You’re not a police officer, you can’t go to someone’s house and force them to talk, so you have to make empathy work,” he explains. Something certainly complicated when most of your interlocutors are dead. «Sometimes, when the corpse is very damaged or even there is no corpse and a cause of death must be established, a psychologist of the dead is needed, someone who gets into the mind of that victim and is able to elucidate “what was his mental state and hence what was the cause of death,” he illustrates. Standard Related News No ‘Waiting for the Flood’, by Dolores Redondo, a serial killer in Bilbao during the years of lead Miriam Villamediana The writer San Sebastian publishes a new novel in which he abandons Inspector Salazar. His name, by the way, is not an ‘Anglo’ whim, but a nickname. “Nash is the international forensic code that means natural, accidental, suicide or homicide, which are the causes of death,” he clarifies before venturing a promising future with Amaia Salazar. «I can tell you that Nash and Amaia are going to get along very well; I like how they interact. They are very different, they come from very different matriarchal structures, but they are the perfect good cop and bad cop. Where Amaia can be harsher, Nash has the sensitivity to empathize,” advances an author who, if she has learned anything maneuvering between the crest of the wave of the bestseller and the lowest passions, is that “the majority of human beings are capable of kill if you give them the right circumstances. «The criminal mind fascinates because you keep wondering how someone is capable of doing that. And at the same time you feel identified because it is still another human being who does it,” he reflects.
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