Delve into the intriguing world of «El Minero Rojo» written by David Ortiz Zepeda and illustrated by Manuel Mendez Martinez, a captivating tale published in 2019. This book seamlessly merges storytelling and art, immersing readers in a diabolical and mesmerizing journey through the landscapes of Atacama. Uncover this compelling tale that transports you to a way of life where the mind wanders through the sunny and dry expanse, painting a vivid picture of the North’s diabolic allure.
David was born in 1989 in Copiapo, Atacama. Writer and journalist (a Graduate in Editing, Cultural Journalism and Criticism from the University of Chile) who originally published Salivario in 2016, a book that also includes his own illustrations. David has worked in film productions as “Espacio Desierto,” “Caudal, escombros de memoria” and “Arriba en las Estrellas, especial de astroturismo”. He started the literary reading Literror, which has held a countercultural milieu in the desert since 2014. His book “El Minero Rojo” was illustrated by Manuel Mendez Martinez and published in 2019. He shares his experiments with poetry and drawing on his Instagram account Tornillo Rojo.
Below is an excerpt from this amazing book:
«He is called the red miner because he wears a helmet of that color.
He is always screaming into a microphone attached to a speaker tied to his abdomen, where he claims to come from another time to warn us of things that are about to happen soon and of which he learned about after falling down from a shaft of an abandoned vein.
That time he rolled about a hundred meters until he hit a huge nest of kissing bugs and died.
After a few days, he regained consciousness, He stood up to climb the cave and emerged walking among the rocks, in the sunlight.
He emerged reborn and with the conviction to save us. He left amidst a cloud of dust raised by the wind from a plain toward Inca de Oro, an almost uninhabited hamlet on an arid flatland of Atacama.
There he asked some artisanal miners where the devil was, and they pointed a large abandoned house.
He did not hesitate to walk up to it and force the door to get in. He encountered a descending staircase. He went down to the basement challenging shouting to bet his liver on the devil, who there was playing pool devil, who there was playing pool on a black cloth table, alone and lit by candelabra.
The miner took a pool cue, determined. The demon had a bark of skin a mixture of stone and ground meat, and smiled with gold teeth to accept the game. Then he put some copper-colored balls on the table and they started the seven-day game.»
