“I, master Gonçalvo / from Verceo nominated, / going on a pilgrimage / I fell in a meadow, / green and well-worn, / well-populated with flowers, / covetous place / omne tired». This is how Gonzalo de Berceo, the first poet of the Spanish language, once introduced himself, and this is how his readers learned to recognize him as a friend, someone with a sense of humor and an understanding look. Berceo now reappears not as a writer but as the protagonist of Silo’s Tavern (Tusquets), a criminal novel in which the poet looks a bit Bogart, a bit Pantagruel and a bit Alatriste. Berceo, in Silo’s Tavern, he is 30 years old and he is a disbelieving and cohabiting monk, lover of his writing profession but rather lazy. He is an admirer of the tempranillo grape and of women of a certain age and is slightly touched on the head because he fought in Las Navas de Tolosa and He came home with what is now called post-traumatic stress. One day, his superior in San Millán sends him to Santo Domingo de Silos on a confusing mission. Upon arrival, Berceo finds a political-criminal conspiracy that he will have to decipher along with a beautiful cast of secondary players: barmaids that look like Brigitte Bardot in 1956, drunken and wise Moors; confessors who drag their r’s; witches, fanatics, cannibals… Sounds like The name of the rose? Yes, of course, and that’s fine: that the believers pray for the soul of brother Umberto.
There is another important fact about Silo’s Tavern: its author signs with a pseudonym, Lorenzo G. Acebedo, and only identifies himself as a man who left the monastic retreat for a woman. His explanations now arrive in writing, without it being possible to investigate his origin.
90% of the manuscripts and a third of the works of chivalry and heroism have disappeared
“As a good Christian, Berceo was a man who appreciated sin, but above all sinners,” Acebedo begins. «All his work oozes appreciation for the poor and their clumsy crimes and he looks where no one else looks: a drunken priest, a nun who loves pleasure, a desperate man who wants to hang himself… This cannot be from hearing sins in confession (it is very irritating and usually has the opposite effect) but from natural appreciation»
In addition, Acebedo maintains that Berceo “was a poet who worked making propaganda for the monasteries, what we now call an organic intellectual. It seems plausible to me because it is contradictory: a good man writing for hire. Something like this is only understood by a man with high doses of skepticism. Same as Bogart».