Relato de un náufrago

The story of Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor who fell overboard from the Colombian destroyer A.R.C. Caldas when the cargo of contraband it was carrying came loose, and who spent ten days lost at sea, comes to the stage. When he was young, Gabriel García Márquez followed the case and the story was edited a year later in Barcelona. This time around, Àngel Llàcer and Emilio Gutiérrez Caba are the shipwrecked sailor and reporter respectively.
 
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time. That is the very long title of one of the most captivating true stories I've ever read. It was written in 1955 by a young reporter called Gabriel García Márquez for the newspaper El Espectador in Bogota. It is a fantastic adventure that shifts between the tragedy of real events and the unexpected and cruel sense of humour of the two central figures: the reporter and the shipwrecked sailor. This excellent report, which transforms every written word into a three-dimensional image that highlights the immense storytelling talent that "Gabo" displayed in his earliest work, led me to think that this was a narrative that could easily be transformed into dramatic material. It is a play, a tale, which immerses the audience in the loneliness and the struggle for survival of a human being who is about to die, about to be suffocated by lies and silence, and devoured by the sharks of the Caribbean and the predators of a dictatorship. And if it is Emilio Gutiérrez Caba and Angel Llàcer who are telling the tale... then I'm the one who is speechless.
Marc Montserrat-Drukker