La Jornada: The blind army gets “into the gaps left by history”

“Historians work with real facts and do not have the luxury of imagining too much; on the other hand, invention and speculation are the territory of novelists. Where no one tells anything, one wonders what could have happened,” says Mexican writer David Toscana, based in Spain, who presented his book in Mexico The blind army Alfaguara Novel Award 2026.

The work is a dark and powerful fable built from an event from more than a thousand years ago, when, after defeating the Bulgarians in the battle of Klyuch, in 1014, Basil II, emperor of Byzantium, ordered 15,000 of the defeated soldiers to be blinded, leaving one in every 100 blind to guide the blind back to their lands.

The author learned about this story 20 years ago, through the manuscript Skylitzes of Madrid. “This is the only historical document there is of that episode; no one wrote, on the Bulgarian side, what happened to these blind men.”

The story haunted the writer for years, initially from a more realistic approach and focused on the journey of the blind people back to their homes. He was thinking not so much of an odyssey, as if it were 15 thousand Ulysses returning home, “but rather of a book by the Greek philosopher Xenophon, called Anabasis, also known as The march of the 10 thousand, where a group of Greek soldiers must return home after a failed war.”

Later he understood that the core of the story was in the arrival, in the way in which each person reinserts themselves into what was once their life. Thus he decided to reconstruct archetypal characters from that time: the blacksmith, the carpenter, the baker, the scribe or the pig farmer, to explain what each person’s life is like after returning home.

Toscana believes that he found the novel when he found the tone in which he wanted to tell it, and it was not tragic. “If I tell a tragedy in a tragic way, I feel like I crush the characters. Rather, I wanted it to be a triumph of the spirit; a place where an emperor says: ‘I’m going to defeat them,’ and they respond: ‘you took out my eyes, but you didn’t defeat me.'”

For the also winner of the Xavier Villaurrutia Award for his novel The bridges of Königsberg (2009), literature plays a key role in restoring the testimony of the defeated – “supposedly defeated” –, which is often not narrated and ends up disappearing.

“Literature has always gotten into the gaps left by history. And it is not about solving them in the most reliable way, but about doing it in the most interesting, most beautiful, most intense way. You are not looking for historical truth, but for a poetic force, giving strength and meaning to the characters.

“This fact of the blind serves to give essence to the novel, to talk about vision, about what we see when we don’t see, about what a world that we have to imagine is like. It serves to talk about many things beyond the tragic, violent, cruel fact of having gouged out the eyes of 15 thousand people.”

During the creation process, Toscana took on the task of walking blindly in the Black Forest, known as Schwarzwald, a mountainous region in southwestern Germany. “It was a failure, we gave up the first night; I learned almost nothing. The only thing about that exercise that happened in the novel was that I raised my feet a lot, so as not to trip. Blindness is something much deeper than my almost childish exercise.”

Putin, Trump and Netanyahu, our three Basils

In today’s society, estimates the author of Tula Station (1995), blindness abounds even in sight: “We have many stimuli to seduce the eye, but not the understanding. The eye is kidnapping many things, and we are supposed to see, but we don’t.” For Toscana, the greatest current blindness has to do with leaving aside the word. “Reading is important to develop individuality, understanding, and the ability to discern.”

Although the novel focuses on the experience of the blind, Basil II does not go unnoticed, a figure who embodies power, who brutally punishes and subjugates the defeated army.

“There are three Basilios that are very clear to me today: Vladimir Putin with Ukraine, Benjamin Netanyahu with Gaza and Donald Trump, who said that he is going to destroy a civilization, something that some god shouted thousands of years ago, but today we no longer say those things. We have several.”

Tuscany considers a The blind army the impulse to want to write his next novel: “writing for me is a discovery; as I write, what it is about is revealed to me. Now I have a plan for my next novel, which I am not going to start soon, because they are taking me on a trip.”