The Wind's Mail

Do you know what love is? I do: free fall and upward force at the same time.
Like the wind.
If you want to check it out, you will have to visit a distant village in the interior of the Magellanic pampa, before reaching Puerto Natales, following a long dirt track that will probably never be paved, a detour in the road that goes like an ancestral worm into routes where you will only find desolation, aridity and coirón. Opasnost -that is the name of the place- like other villages, is a remnant of the old idea that past governments had of populating the Patagonia. Current governments evoke that dream, but take great pains to boycott it. Although in this case the word settlement might be a bit pretentious.

In a remote Patagonian village called Opasnost, the inhabitants live isolated by a very strange and almost inexplicable climatic phenomenon that concentrates the most impulsive and swirling winds, making access difficult and tempering the mood of its people. Those who live in this southern hamlet anxiously await the arrival of the postman, who, in order to deliver the mail, must fly over the skies with a suit capable of withstanding the blizzard and an unwieldy kite on his back.
The search for an extinct bird, the boreal curlew, also enters the narrative plot. Everything seems to indicate that Opasnost is a place where the rare dwells: the merciless winds, the southern Icarus, the lost species.
The Wind’s Mail is a story where the wind acquires a singular protagonism as supreme monarch of the pampas and vastness, but also a different look at the singular, though daily feat of inhabiting spaces where modernity does not arrive and where the myths that were considered forgotten return from another time to recover the pact of men with the territory.

Key points

• The nostalgia of the postman’s job in an environment as desolate and remote as Patagonia.
• A story that rescues myths and is nourished by a variety of fantastic ingredients: a king, the wind rose, a boreal curlew.
• From an award-winning Patagonian author.

Óscar Barrientos

2018 – Pablo Neruda Foundation Prize for Poetic Trajectory
2015 – Ibero-American Julio Cortázar Prize, La Habana, Cuba
2014 – National Prize of Narrative and Chronicle Francisco Coloane
1997, 2013 – Municipal Prize of Valdivia Fernando Santiván
2001 – Literary Creation Grant from the Book and Reading Fund.
1988 – María Cristina Ursic Prize for Poetry