With The Battles of Rosalino Triunfo Arciniegas won the 1989 Enka Prize. He was unknown and this is his first book, a fact that becomes relevant when reading it now, because it is amazing that such a rich, recursive style, such an overflowing imagination correspond to what is a first book, almost always notoriously timid, even clumsy at times. But no, this is a beautiful book that is the best test there is for a book intended for readers around ten years of age. This proof is paradoxical: what shows that a children’s book is good is that an adult reader reads it with delight, with pleasure. And that happens here, with The Battles of Rosalino.
The edition I read is recent and brings two exceptional gifts, one is a text by Arciniegas himself dated 2002 that refers to the preparation of this book: “I wrote the first version in one sitting in Meissen, a neighborhood in the south of Bogotá in 1988. One night the women of the house woke me up because the thieves had broken in and since I was the only man at that time, it was up to me to face the danger, piss myself with a broom, and then For the trembling women, I searched every corner of the three floors. ‘Let there be no one, let there be no one,’ I told myself. Fortunately, there was no one. We woke up talking in the living room (…) when… my friends… went to sleep, then I sat down to work on an idea that had been on my mind since the previous year, happy because I had saved the maids from the dangers of the night. I wrote for more than thirty hours without stopping. eat, but during the night there was no longer any need. The noise of the machine filled the house. ‘Last night I slept so peacefully knowing that you were awake,’ one of the women told me.” He says that the main character is a blacksmith, like his father, and he says that in the fourteen years that the book was written he made twenty-four different versions of The Battles of Rosalino.
The story he tells is summarized in chapter 2: Rosalino “became famous for the three great battles and the nature of the three terrible contenders: the mosquito that horrified the fleas, the witch who chased the cat and the Chichira dragon that stole girls. The bandits made and broke in his kingdom. There were almost no fleas left in the neighborhood; the mosquito, who believed himself invincible. Of the witch, fat and finicky, it was said that she only fed on black cat broth. There were almost no cats left in the neighborhood. And, as for the dragon, he did not respect a pretty girl, I wish she were black and had a little tun tun step.
My favorite character in The Battles of Rosalino is Clodoveo Tatatá, the tree, yes, a tree, that is in Rosalino’s house: “Clodoveo, the tree that shades Rosalino’s house, trembles and sighs its crop of birds. Through the window he spies the master’s morning ceremony, who then straightens up to avoid the hump even though he was born about seventy years ago. But ‘it is better to be safe than sorry,'” Clodoveo, heart of a bird, stretches out to the other side of the house, as if longing for other airs. Trembling of leaves in the music of the wind. He regrets that it is not Sunday, when Rosalino takes a nap beneath the conversation of the birds, and sighs: ‘he who leans close to a good tree, is sheltered by a good shade’ Clodoveo, full of birds and multicolored leaves, feels like a cloud, a wind, a bird, shaken by an even better thought: ‘he who walks with birds, finally flies’ Clodoveo then, so tender, seems to float: he eats the birds, the house, the clovers. He eats the passing clouds, the perfumed wind, the roads, and he is happy to the very roots. The earth is sweetened and the sap is pure honey. other countries with their harvest of birds. That wears a gray cloud as a shirt and paints its mustaches, speaks strange languages and the leaves stir like drunks. That at midnight it dances next to the moon and at dawn it remains still in its usual place, full of wind and music.
