when you lived slower

This selection of texts by Antonio Rojas Gómez, a long-time journalist and writer, is a good example of the author’s great craft in narrative, particularly in short stories.

The book begins with “Olivia”, which could be considered a novel. A moving text, which begins when she is run over, and after that comes a flashback in which she reveals a surprise. Readers will be carried away by this beautiful story, a good starting point for the book.

Some texts provoke nostalgia, such as “Don Blas disappears”, which shows us a neighborhood life that has been disappearing in large cities (except in some pockets, such as the Yungay neighborhood in Santiago). A neighborhood in which the disappearance of a member of the pack does not go unnoticed, and some seek solutions to the enigma. It is sad to think that today, in most of our neighborhoods, the disappearance of a person who lives alone would probably not even be noticed.

These changes in the coexistence of communities, due to the evolution of cities in a market economy, appear in other stories in the book, for example, this mutation stands out in one of the final sentences of the story “At that time”: “ Well, stories like this happened back in the day when people lived more slowly. Now that life is faster, they happen too. And they are inconsequential.”

The previous quote illustrates one of the author’s strengths in language management: the excellent use of punctuations, something that is sometimes not given the importance it deserves. Another good example of this occurs in the story “My Son”, a great, shocking story, one of my favorites in this selection, and which we already knew from having been part of the anthology “Santiago Canalla”, compiled by Bartolomé Leal. . At the beginning of the story, referring to the son’s partner, the narrator tells us: “She was not the partner he wanted for him. He was not the son I wanted for myself. But he was my son. And she was his companion.” Each period and followed gives additional strength to the statements.

There are deep phrases that leave the reader reflecting. As in the story “Nicolasa Fernández”, another of my favorites in this sample in which all the texts are good. In the context of that story, alluding to the female character, who made certain decisions, and opted for a bourgeois way of life, the following phrase was very powerful to me: “What happens, Nicolasa Fernández, is that a person would like to live many lives. , but you only have the opportunity to live one.” A story in which love is at the center, and which in my opinion defines better than a dictionary, that Portuguese expression that has no direct translation into Spanish: saudade.

I will not make a detailed reference to each of the eleven stories, only to mention that themes that portray the human condition very well are addressed, such as family conflicts, in “The Portrait of Uncle Federico”, or the repudiation and marginalization of the different people, in the case of “The Monster”.

Finally, the story that gives its name to the work. “The night is cold”, dedicated to the journalist Mónica González. This work shows us Hemingway’s iceberg theory in all its splendor. Three agents of the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship talk in a van. The tip of the iceberg in this case is the thread of the conversation, which reveals to us, without at any time making it explicit, that a gale is about to break loose.

Datasheet:

The night is cold.
Antonio Rojas Gómez, 2023
Forge Publishing
130 pages