The Garden Next Door by José Donoso

Author:José Donoso [Donoso, José]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802133687
Google: fbtQ9RKT0tUC
Amazon: 0802133681
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1994-01-06T13:00:00+00:00

WE HAD A late lunch in a bar, numerous glasses of red wine, many indigestible fried squid sandwiches, leaning on the counter, standing on a floor littered with greasy paper napkins and cigarette butts, while the regular customers were leaving for their siestas.

We’ve already said all there was to say about our meeting with Marcelo Chiriboga and Núria Monclús. With the first glasses of wine, I let my admiration show, but gradually the wine turns sour and I start to explain that despite its reputation, Chiriboga’s work is lifeless; that it’s really an invention of that financial wizard Núria Monclús; that its quality is weighed down by its shortcomings; that it was invented by Núria to fill her already well-lined coffers; that she’s a money-hungry, avaricious Catalan, a Jewish shark, a Fagin in skirts, and Latin American novelists are used by her the way Fagin used his little boys. She’s well known for the haughty manner with which she tours the aisles of the Frankfurt Book Fair; her signature is enough for entire series, translated from the Spanish, to be brought out by Suhrkamp, by Gollancz, by Feltrinelli, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, by Spanish and Latin American publishing houses that she has by the throat, yes, yes, by the throat. Of the two, I explain, Núria, and not Chiriboga, is the one who really counts. Chiriboga is just an imitator of Vargas Vila, an opportunist like all the rest—Gloria, who knows my admiration for him, can’t bear my bitterness and my envy; this evening we’ll get drunk, there’ll be a fight, and we’ll sleep in separate beds—and now young writers are following in their footsteps, using everything, including the Cuban revolution and the Chilean tragedy, in their climb. But the publishers no longer fool the young, who don’t even know Chiriboga’s work or his name. Bijou is a good example.

“But I do know him. I’ve read everything he’s written.”

“And do you like him?” Gloria asks.

“Very much.”

“Why did you deny it, then?”

“Because I knew that denying it was the only way to make him remember me.”

“He’s Núria’s lover.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’ll remember me; he’ll forget you, Katy, and you, Uncle Julio. I can’t stand people like him. I like to beat them at their own game.”

“And did you beat him?”

“Sure I did. A small victory, but I won it.”

I’ve had too much wine, as has Katy, for whom everything’s a steady downward spiral over which she has no control. I say that we’ll take the subway right here, on this corner; it will leave us near home. Katy interjects, “I’m going with you people. It’s great to take a siesta in Pancho’s apartment, it’s so cool. I roast in mine. Are you coming, Bijou?”

Gloria and I feel too wiped out by our humiliation to say no, and they follow us. On the way Katy gives Bijou an intimate rundown of her mixed-up life: in Montevideo, after an all-male orgy in his apartment, which was also his consulting room, her lover’s body was discovered, his throat slit with one of his own scalpels.

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