‘The embers of the snake’, by Juan Navarro García: the rage of the fire, the emptiness of the ashes | Babelia

In 2022, 40% of the burned area in Europe was Spanish. That summer 6% of the province of Zamora burned. The first major fire, in June, burned 25,000 hectares. The second, perhaps the largest in the history of our country, devastated 31,473 hectares and killed four people. 75% of the area devastated by the flames was forest mass full of highly combustible undergrowth. It started around six in the afternoon on July 17, when lightning struck the Culebra mountain range. On Saturday the 16th, journalist Juan Navarro, who had already written about the first fire, published . The dry weather conditions and high temperatures created the conditions for them to multiply and it could be much worse if there was a significant increase in wind. He couldn’t know what awaited him. Late in the afternoon of Sunday the 17th, Navarro showed his journalist’s card to the Civil Guard so he could drive along a cut dirt path. He wouldn’t take any chances, he promised them. That night he wrote of his car, “with the orange wall lighting up behind the laptop screen.”

Chief Leila Guerriero maintains that “a chronicler is, by definition, someone who arrives late, who takes time to see and more time to tell what he saw.” Juan Navarro was not late because he was there reporting, but since then he has returned again and again to those landscapes of desolation, to the towns without a future and the blackened forests where trucks pass carrying charred logs, and he has also gone with questions to the offices of those responsible for the regional environment in their aseptic headquarters in Valladolid. And so he has written a great chronicle to tell what is still being seen: this report on the fires in Zamora is a harsh human, political and economic portrait of a forgotten Spain that no one seems to care about. As in The time of fire, by , centered on and which Captain Swing has just translated, The embers of the snake is a book of exemplary journalism in which specific people—from firefighters to neighbors—are dramatically connected to the consequences of climate change, without which the apocalyptic sixth-generation fires cannot be explained.

“They have let the people die,” says an 80-year-old retiree sitting in his workshop office adorned with a photograph of the fires. In Navarro’s story, data and views on the depopulation of the area and the increase in forest area due to the abandonment of livestock farming overlap with the denunciation of the neglect of the provincial political class, which accumulates unfulfilled promises to improve the contractual situation of the brigades, help those affected or invest in the economic development of the region. “No one resigns and everything remains the same.” Since there is no civic nerve, as some of its inhabitants confirm, there are no pressure or protest mechanisms. The paroxysm comes when describing the actions that were promoted to raise resources after the devastation. From the failed music festival promoted by to the painful initiatives of , which raised 250 euros. The contrast between political action and reality is devastating. It brings tears to your eyes when at the end of the book, when returning to the case of , it is explained that the Gold Medal for heroism awarded posthumously has not been given to his family.

The first part of the book reconstructs the dramatic situations that caused the deaths during those July days. At several moments the reader feels the suffocating heat, it seems to him that he is carrying the weight of the firefighters’ backpacks, he accompanies the photographer who almost lost his life or the people fleeing in melting cars, he sees the animals die, he contemplates how The men trapped by the flames die. The speech is pure anguished present.

Then come the consequences, the moment in which the Sierra de la Culebra stops being a center of media interest and in the forests there is silence because there are no animals or only the sound of the blades of the windmills. Especially brilliant is the description of the therapy of a group of firefighters. The psychologists ask them to fill a glass jar with anonymous messages written on small pieces of paper. There is frustration, sadness and solidarity. But also that piece of blank paper loaded with meaning. It is like the emotional emptiness that the reader is left with after experiencing so much resigned rage and saying goodbye to Daniel’s wife, who has tattooed the memory of her husband on her arm.