Magical Thinking Metaphorical Wall

Review: Alberto Roblest. Trans. Nicolás Kanellos. AGAINST THE WALL: STORIES. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2021. ISBN:  978-1-55885-925-8

Michael Sedano

"I found myself right in front of the door to paradise"

That's not Paradise on the other side of the wall, that's the United States, and by the stories being lived on the other side of that wall, paradise is a metaphor for a bad joke. These people are up against the wall, they have hit the wall, they're walled-in, their backs are against the wall facing all comers. The hellish lives these people live here suggests they're also walled-in.

The kind of magical thinking supposing a wall at the southern border would stop people infects these stories in a good way with their own magical flights from normalcy to carry characters into delightful, now and again, hilarious, situations.

The first story, "Blackened Obelisk" begins with puro fantasy. Imagine the Washington Monument crawling with millions of insects that fuse into a giant creature. Movie fans may envision the bugs in Starship Troopers, or Evolution's mutant conquered by Head & Shoulders shampoo. If so, the story gets all the more pizzazz.

I'm not over-reading nor over-reaching. That stuff is built into the structure of the stories. This first story about the cockroaches is broadly obvious in its connections to Oscar Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People, or the syndicated raza cartoon series La Cucaracha. And there's this author's message:

"Poets inspired by the happening drafted sad prayers, and only of the novelists, just the fiction writers, saw it as more than just a simple… as something else."

A hundred thirty pages later, those million golden brown cockroaches on the obelisk have become something else, the teeming masses of a big city needing "food for the poor, the thousands of little tiny creatures moving along the streets."

Subtle structural links hold the stories together so there's a continuity among them. The obelisk story ends with the image of millions of crawling critters. The next story, "We're Here and If You Get Rid of Us We'll Come Back", dedicated to Cesar Chavez, opens with the image of teeming masses emerging from hiding. The story closes with the masses returning to their shadows.

Alberto Roblest dedicates most stories to familiars and artists. Roque Dalton, Luis Buñuel, Jack Keroac, Octavio Paz, his mother and father.

The father's story recounts a sexual adventure on a random highway. The mother's story, Lost & Found, is the longest in the collection and its most well-crafted piece. In contrast, the Chavez story and Roque Dalton pieces could easily be left on the cutting room floor. Cesar's piece offers a tired rant, and the Dalton voice just feels sorry for itself. Those two, however, compared to Luis Buñuel's story, illustrate the difference between mere narrative, and story.

"Work Abandoned" for Luis Buñuel, starts off on the same vein as the two whining pieces. It's in Mexico, the wrong side of the wall. Carlos Villegas got ripped off and is moving his family across town, a victim of a corrupt real estate rip-off, to an abandoned job site. Dead-serious political outrage consumes Carlos, in Spanish he probably feels like a pendejo. When total absurdity turns Carlos' lament into slapstick comedy, it comes with a kick in the ass from Sisyphus. It's what Carlos gets for being a pendejo.

Carlos is moving a mattress up a steep hill. He stops for a breather, the wind catches his mattress and Carlos watches helplessly as his marriage bed careens back where it came from. Luckily, Carlos is not Orpheus who'd be condemned for looking back. There's a beauteous façade on the apartment house, the only finished element. It's visible only from the wall.

"Lost & Found for my mother" not only is the collection's longest story, it's its best work. Roblest and Kanellos craft a fast-moving narrative that starts uneasily enough with Ramirez, an incompetent narrator thrust into a bus depot in hell. There's a wall--a luggage cage staffed by a truculent baggage agent. Ramirez is one of many lost souls with lost baggage. There's a police riot. Ramirez is bloodied and escapes into an endless warehouse of timeless lost luggage, a place akin to Rudy Garcia's Closet of Discarded Dreams.

Ramirez starts rifling through other people's luggage. The catalog of Ramirez' discoveries suggest this could be the other end of the enormous sinkhole Jesus Treviño discovered, but Ramirez' vision of a fatal car crash suggests a connection to Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

Trickster tales are always a hit, so one of the undedicated stories, Tonantzin, will be a highlight for most readers. Read it and dedicate it to yourself.

Translator Nicolás Kanellos has given Alberto Robles the same clean, colloquial voice to every story. Owing to that connection, the seventeen stories take on an identity a reader will recognize whether an omniscient or first-person voice is telling the story.

Blank that wall. It was magical thinking to suppose a wall along the border would be useful to any purpose than making money. There was already a wall. They built more wall. And yet, they're here. We are here, immigrants.

That pointless wall turns out not entirely useless, it makes a good metaphor for a collection of short fiction that could as readily carry a title like "life in these united states, or, take my hand, I'm a stranger in paradise."