Like his village, Manuel López Espinal seems to have stepped straight out of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Solitude and fatality have conspired with time to mark his face, as they have marked the deserted streets of the little town of Pilé, with its thousand inhabitants.
The town, which is hidden away at the end of an interminable dust road, is home to the best straw weavers in the world: those who make the “montecristis”. These artisans with their golden hands have always woven knowledgeably, artistically, with the obstinacy of insistence on perfect work and an object that is unique. In his house built on stilts, made of wood and bamboo, Manuel who is one of the village’s maestros, has been weaving since the break of dawn. He knows his straw, which likes the softness of the early morning air and takes a shape perfectly as long as one avoids the hours of intense sunshine.
