Alfonso López imagined hitmen on strike and wrote The Melancholy of the Lions

Ideas about what would happen if the hitmen went on strike and stopped caring for the exotic pets that some people who commit crimes have gave rise to the novel The melancholy of the lions, according to its author, Alfonso López Corral.

The narrator told The Day that part of its text, recently published by the Autonomous University of Nuevo León (UANL), connects with the biblical story of Daniel and the lions. That of the hitmen who go on strike is rather an idea to be explored regarding what would be the ways, the mechanisms in which violence would decrease..

He reported that he arrived at the reflection that the way of life outside the law is already completely in the social fabric; That is to say, not only are they the hitmen, but a lot of people, directly or indirectly, are connected to it and it makes the explanations and response and solution mechanisms to the violence itself a little more difficult..

López Corral said that he finds humor to be a very important resource, as it allows us to discuss issues difficult, tremendous, cruel and even incomprehensible (all the violence that has hit us in recent years) from another perspective; It can provide different information, but at the same time delicate and serious. It completes the angle of what we think we are seeing when we look at what is happening.

No explicit violence

The narrative, he continued, omits to expressly describe any execution, although it addresses “violence clearly. There are hitmen who refuse to kill, but anyway and in other stories I have tried not to describe directly. It’s something I leave for other writers and other ways of narrating.

“We are inundated with violence in the media; With one click we can see those videos that they upload and I’m not really interested; This narrative, however, is a small game that closes later, a tribute to one of my favorite stories, ‘The Bridge Over the Owl River’, by Ambrose Bierce.”

This story begins when they are about to hang the character, the rope comes loose and he can apparently flee. In the end it is discovered that he imagined everything. “That is a game that I really like in literature, played by Borges, Horacio Quiroga, Ernest Hemingway, and I tried to repeat it in the novel with The Skinny and his friend, when they apply the escape law, They run and shoot them.”

The professor also mentioned that the place where his story takes place is important, as it explains the way people behave. In Navojoa, in the south of Sonora, it is very hot, which is decisive for people; The ways of acting have a lot to do with temperature, vegetation, and water availability. A fair description of the place where people live and history takes place is important, because it generates harmony.

He added that if he is talking about a person from the Mayo tribe, the vegetation, the place, the way of speaking and doing things have to match the place where he is located. Thus, in the novel one of its protagonists, Santos, belongs to that town.

At first he is an alcoholic. There is a joke, mentioned in the novel, that an alcoholic is a pre-Jehovah’s Witness or future religious. However, the way Santos sees it tries to represent the ways in which the people of southern Sonora, Navojoa, the Mayo Valley and the Mayo tribe see religion, which is combined with the customs they have and the way in which Catholicism has become embedded with them, only they become Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Alfonso López said that in his narrative the protagonists are The Veti or Santos, because in order to understand how he thought it, he gave the characters more or less equal weight. “It seems that the center is not on a main character, that there is no hero’s journey, although with The Veti and Santos there is a trip in reverse.”

Regarding the names in the title, he explained that they adapt to the use of the region.

“We stick with the nickname or the first name by which we know someone. Many times it ends up being more significant that we know the Inge, but we don’t know what his name is, or his last name. I tried to get him to go there. Some do have the last name, like Santos, whose last name is characteristic of the Mayo Valley, the complete opposite of the other protagonist, of whom I do not mention his name, but rather the profession to which he dedicates himself: The Veti, the vet.”