Miguel Bonnefoy, “The Dream of the Jaguar” (Rivages)

The weight of gold. In a street in Maracaibo, a little girl plays with a wooden truck. She first rolled it through the corridors of her house, then onto the sidewalks and the town’s main square where her mother stopped it, “because she seemed capable of continuing her way to the Brazilian border”. That day, Ana Maria understands that her daughter “would go far in life, but also in the world”. Born on January 23, 1958, the day of the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, she bears the name of her country: Venezuela. A name that will connect her to her roots when, after dreaming of elsewhere and running her fingers over the family atlases, she leaves Maracaibo for Paris, where her son Cristobal will be born.

Born to a Venezuelan mother and a French father, Miguel Bonnefoy takes his reader on a journey between the two continents that constitute him, through stunning family sagas that resemble immemorial tales, imbued with the impressions of his childhood between Europe and America Latin. In Black sugar (Rivages, 2017), a Caribbean family saw their existence turned upside down by the legend of a missing treasure. Legacy (Rivages, 2020) retraced the trajectory of uprooted people, from the slopes of the Jura to Santiago de Chile. In The Jaguar’s Dream, three generations are fulfilling themselves in a path to which their birth did not predestine them. An orphan, Venezuela’s father is abandoned on the steps of a church, in a street that would soon bear the name of an eminent doctor. The name of Antonio Borjas Romero. His.

Taken in by a beggar who, worried about seeing him end up as a thug, urges him to work rather than steal, Antonio offers himself as a handyman in a brothel where a swarm of sailors arrives every day. One evening, one of these men pulls from his vest a cigarette rolling machine, similar to the one found in baby Antonio’s diapers. The sailor will return a few weeks later, “African necklaces around the neck” and a letter that would change Antonio’s life. Without her, Antonio would never have attended college or met Ana Maria. “I will only marry the man who will tell me the most beautiful love story”, she warns him. Antonio, who knows nothing about love, then sits in the lobby of a bus station, a sign “I listen to love stories” in front of him. He will collect as many as he comes to wonder “if there was a single story in the world that wasn’t about love”.

Confronted with “terrifying minotaur” of the dictatorship, engaged against the regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Antonio and Ana Maria will become great doctors and will give birth to a free woman whose story will be written far from her family. “You will only leave when you free yourself from the weight of gold” predicts a clairvoyant in Venezuela. As if melted into the precious metal, Miguel Bonnefoy’s writing invites his reader on a sensory journey where legends and family mythologies mingle with the revolutions of the 20th century.^e century. His novel is that of a goldsmith in love with pure romance, giving food for dreams.