In the jargon of the trade, the Comanche territory is this zone where the instinct of the war reporter tells him to stop and turn back, to save his skin. That of the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte will have been Yugoslavia torn apart.
Posted at 9:30 a.m.
Because before devoting himself entirely to writing, he was a journalist in a conflict zone for twenty years. In Cyprus, Lebanon, Chad, El Salvador, Nicaragua and many other places, he learned to tame the whistle of bullets and shells, to recognize “the particular smell of cities at war” that you can’t smell it anywhere else.
This short story written in Sarajevo and Mostar, in 1993 and 1994, has nothing to do with a personal text, which has the merit of making it all the more interesting. These are snippets of everyday life in a war zone, intertwined with memories of other conflicts, of two inseparable reporters who share the same black humor and one of whom, the cameraman, cultivates the obsession of filming a bridge that is shattered .
In this brief foray into a dangerous profession, furnished with tasty anecdotes, we meet veterans, those who have seen all the colors in the four corners of the globe; there are also those Sunday journalists who arrive as tourists, or even those “strange” people with whom wars abound, like the German journalist who threw crumbs at the pigeons and got carried away when the bombardments frightened them. And if we immerse ourselves so intensely in the text, it is for the skylight that it opens up behind the scenes of a universe having its own rules, far from any form of civilization and to which we could hardly have access otherwise.
Comanche territory
Arturo Pérez-Reverte (translated from Spanish by Gabriel Iaculli)
The beautiful letters
120 pages