:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/SIPSTTFZQJAIJBLGJSDS7SYXEY.jpeg "What Lies on the Other Side: This is “The Door I Didn’t Want to Open,” an anthology of Spanish-American short stories")
In September 2020, the Colombian publisher Alejandro Alba Garcia came up with the idea of exploring the Panamericana Editorial catalog in search of something that would unify the voices of certain writers who had worked on similar concepts and themes in their respective literatures, from their respective perspectives.
The research was not aesthetic. The publisher does not intend to find a current of thought or to take a position in relation to society or to art itself; Alba’s intention, perhaps unknowingly, was to see how a person is able to open or close a door, and not so much in the literal action, but in everything the concept entails.
Eleven writers, eleven ways of writing on a door, that’s what the editor has come to; eleven voices from different parts of Latin America and Europe who write about futurism and dystopia, and talk about deviant love and cross-genres, who do essays and stories at the same time and tell life.
In “The door I didn’t want to open”authors and authors of the sculpture of Maria del Carmen Perez (Nicaragua), churches Legna Rodriguez (Cuba), Jacqueline Goldberg (Venezuela), Carlos Chernov (Argentina), Antonio Orlando Rodriguez (Cuba), Afonso Cruz (Portugal), Carlos Garayar ( Peru) and the Colombians, Fanny Buitrago, Lina Maria Perez, Octavio Escobar and Miguel Mendoza come together, in a mixture of styles and geographies.
Each story, all different from each other, is accompanied by illustrations, sometimes bright, sometimes dark, by Andrés Rodríguez, in a reinterpretation of the story, reads the back cover of the book. Because “the one who opens the door, the one who sees beyond the surface of the door wants something else: he wants to flee”.
“There are few metaphors more precise and frequent to speak of reading a book than that of a door opening into an unknown place. Two images facilitate this metaphor: the hinge mechanism (this page turning) and the act of opening (this book opening). There are endless variations on this same tune and often include, of course, the semantic and the erotic. In any case, the identification is suggestive: the possibility of access, entry into an unknown dimension is attractive and it is nothing other than the search of which Baudelaire spoke: going “to the bottom of the unknown, to find something new. The pleasure of which we speak so much of novelty is no stranger to this door (or to this book)” – (from the prologue by Alejandro Alba García).
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Readers will find in these pages a bit of all the good that comes from the work of each of these writers and can also witness a true celebration of the short story genre.
Next, courtesy of Panamericana Editorial, we share a fragment of one of the stories included in “The door I didn’t want to open”:
It wasn’t true that confinement or loneliness intimidated him or that bad news eroded his courage or integrity. His heart was firm and his pants snug.
Somehow he was in good company. He had plenty of time to read, to reflect, to evaluate his previous life. As if it were a state-of-the-art computer, its memory typed, moved chips, opened windows and new files. He treated his arrogant self coldly without allowing it to harbor too many feelings or emotions.
Oh! A memory centered on women, his women, who he missed terribly. Most of them were faceless and maybe she liked them when she wasn’t old enough to. Women from his past and his difficult times, with faded faces and radiant smiles, all and none. Some without names and others without voices, blurred dreamlike silhouettes on prison walls and bars, transformed into bitter real life.
He, Rogelio Montero, was not even allowed to look in the patios and had limited visits. For months, I had not listened to classical music or seen the light or the reflection of the moon. He hadn’t liked the clear smell of rain either.
Women forgotten for years and years who suddenly slipped into his room — which he refused to call a cell — and looked at him mockingly from the stairs of insomnia or the walls. Sometimes one by one, sometimes in pairs, light as withered flowers and petals; some with glassy eyes of compassion, others of mockery and disbelief. Girls from classes and schoolyards, by his side in auditoriums, balls, cafeterias, to whom he had promised love, tenderness, eternity and unveiled passions.
She had bought them boxes of chocolates and truffles, colognes, quartz and jade pendants and earrings, and scarves of natural silk. Gifts that at that moment, when she most needed to reach out and remember happy gestures, no one seemed to remember or appreciate. Gifts to whom? A las chicas de discotecas y conciertos, las asiduas al Parque de la 93, quienes deseaban asistir al Teatro Nacional, a los events de la biblioteca Julio Mario Santo Domingo, o las que contentaban con pulseras de chaquiras y soñaban con viajar y trabajar en UNITED STATES.
They were importunate women, nameless to remember, oblivious to the memory of their skin, the demands of routine and desire. What were they doing there? Perhaps for these reasons he had forgotten those faces to which were also added tears, temples and darkened foreheads, disappointments… Why did they annoy him with their perfumes and their ghostly scratches? Neither he nor his insomnia were interested in it… None of them! In her innocence, she had believed to love, to need, to share with a lady: his lady.
Day after day of visiting or not visiting, Sunday to Sunday, Monday and holidays (after the initial scandal subsided, which was followed by scandals), he clung to the announcement and change of tone of the voice of the guard of service, the visit of Ágata: “It is about his wife.”
Besides enduring the wait, the expectations, she needed his love and understanding as much as possible, the gentleness and tact that adorned his treatment and personality, the sparkle in his eyes, his passion in bed , the tone of his voice.
What happened to his wife?
When the scandal subsided, Ágata Loreto left Bogotá without giving him any explanation. However, she told reporters and anyone who would listen that she knew nothing of her husband’s affairs; nothing wanted to know. Con su actitud le adjudicaba culpas y más culpas, como si su padre y sus hermanos fueran personas de hechos immaculate, y no persons responsible for pulso y timón, no quienes adularon y empujaron a Rogelio to intervene in a series of negotiations and componendas que lo llevaron in jail. He is not on his way to wealth and prosperity, nor to live like a king in a condominium in Cartagena, Kavala, Marbella or the French Riviera, as he was promised.
It was therefore not a given to expect affection, even less the loving understanding of a conjugal visit. Under such circumstances, Ágata was not interested in being the wife or the lady. He wasn’t prepared to file a complaint either, he was fed up with his sisters’ complaints, the lawyers’ papers. Everyone who called themselves his best friends apologized, suspected, reasons for leaving, he wouldn’t see their hair.
As for the situation, he had caused it himself. The gruesome Siberian prisons described by novelists like Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn were out of place, even though a prankster with a fake name and fake sender had sent him a second-rate book, published in the 1960s, Prison, the award-winning, thumbs-up looks and underlined. . She couldn’t complain about the treatment or the food they brought her from restaurants, or the clothes her sisters sent her to wash and iron. They were resentful, they followed Ágata’s example.
Ágata was his soul mate, as they said in the movies; Hurt, frightened, she refused him her presence. Ágata, the bride chosen almost in the crowd, would have easily disappeared from his life and his desires if it had not been for the wedding. Ágata, a relentless and well-organized commitment, one of his greatest successes. He loved it and it was practical, it was his upward goal, a relationship eventually turned into affection.
Continue reading:
The paths traveled by the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez
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