Gli ultimi e gli esecrati in El color que el infierno me escondiera di Carlos Martínez Moreno

Among the narrative works by the Uruguayan writer Carlos Martínez Moreno (1917-1986), his last novel, El color que el infierno me escondiera, published in Mexico in 1981, is especially important. Critics have focused on the formal and structural devices of the novel, as well as the intertextual relations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, from which the author takes the title and each epigraph for the twenty-two parts of the text. El color que el infierno me escondiera stresses some events of the bloody struggle in Uruguay between MLN-Tupamaros guerrilla and law enforcement in the Sixties and Seventies of 20th century, without taking a stand on it; it is plain, however, that the biggest responsibility belongs to military and police institutions. Martínez Moreno tries not to distort the reality and to tell the events with a careful documental attention. In spite of this, when choosing the events to be told, Martínez Moreno takes the weak people’s and the victims’ point of view. In this way, he is able to rescue the voice of people without a voice in his masterpiece, and to tell the terrible situation of the victims, even when dealing with former torturers or with those who had exercised their unfair power. Martínez Moreno wishes, as experimented before in Tierra en la boca and in some tales as well, to claim dignity and humanity for the last and execrated peopl