The Caribbean colonies enter the XIX century unsteadily, amidst independence movements and bloody fights. When a black stranger called Cruz arrives in a drab village in Puerto Rico, its dwellers meet him with suspicion and fear because rumour has it that emissaries from the recently freed Haiti have penetrated the island to encourage a rebellion. However, Cruz offers to capture the Haitian firebrand that troubles the area, the elusive Chaulette. The two men are linked by bonds more personal and hurtful than one can imagine.

Together with a twelve-year-old boy and his tutor, Cruz embarks on a chase across the island where he was born a slave, and where he had planned never to return again. They will not be the only people on Chaulette’s trail; so will a squad of bloodthirsty militiamen willing to sacrifice whoever gets in their way, including Cruz. Thus starts a manhunt in which thirst for revenge, hope for freedom, and the tensions that changed the future of the Caribbean intermingle.

Based on true events, Each Shadow, Each Sound oscillates between that paranoid and gloomy Puerto Rico and the last years of the war that led to Haiti’s independence; between the oppressive disillusionment of the present and a past where violence and utopia met on the battlefield. Taking the Western genre and setting it in the Caribbean heat, Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón has been able to shape a tense and fateful atmosphere and a set of fascinatingly ambiguous characters.

Who is, in the end, the real “man from Haiti”?

 

95,000 words ca.  –  Original language:  Spanish