WHERE YOU WON'T STAY

You won't want to stop devouring the stories in this collection. For your own sanity, however, you will need to leave ever so often.

The Houseguest And Other Stories by Amparo Dávila. Translated from the Spaniesh by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, this book was published by New Directions Paperbook Original in 2018.

I’m currently in Mexico City which is awash in celebrations for El Dia de Los Muertos. The Day of the Dead is a holiday traditionally celebrated in early November and it is widely observed in Mexico as well as in other places, especially by people of Mexican heritage. The sites of this ancient city reflect an old spirit with a young vibe. I’ve been to other countries where the Day of the Dead celebrations were predominantly seen the center of town but in Mexico City, it seems very different in flavor.

The entire city is adorned in fresh marigold. In some instances, it is fake marigold, too, but it’s not always easy to tell. Offerings of corn, nuts, and other favorite foods adorn altars in the many parks around the city. Portraits of favorite loved ones of the town, tempestuous and eccentric as they might have been, remain reminders of the power of the freedom of thought, conviction and passion. Long after they’ve passed on, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera continue to inhabit and crisscross this city, albeit, it seems, in another realm.

Hotel Marquis Reforma in Mexico City is decked up for The Day of The Dead celebrations.

When you read writers who work in the Latino tradition, one thing seems to rise into prominence very soon. It seems as if the line between the living and the dead is thin and porous. It’s a beautiful notion, that all those we’ve known in our lives never really pass away, but that they’ve just moved on into another zone of operation from where they continue to keep an eye on us. They return into our permeable world as and when needed.

Amparo Dávila was a Mexican writer best known for her short stories touching on the fantastic as well as the uncanny. I heard about her on my last trip to Brooklyn where, in one of its marvelous bookstores, The Houseguest occupied a special shelf dedicated to women writers in translation. Dávila who passed away in 2020 won the Xavier Villarrutia Award in 1977 for her short story collection, Árboles petrificados. In 2015 a literary prize in her honor was created in Mexico for the best story within the genre of "the fantastic": the Premio Bellas Artes del Cuento Fantástico Amparo Dávila.

When I saw The Houseguest in a local bookstore this week in Mexico City, I bought the book right away without thinking to convert pesos into US dollars. I paid over double the price.. A bookseller of American origin told me that translations are expensive in this country simply because they are very hard to come by. This is a short post because I’m in Mexico City for sightseeing and for attending a wedding; both are hardly conducive to reading and writing. Still, I managed to read many of the stories in this terrific collection.

In these stories in The Houseguest, Dávila creates creates worlds “in miniature” and populates them with people tormented by their manic fears. Whether she is writing about a wife whose husband brings home a strange guest, a young woman plagued by a not-completely-unwelcome visitor in the night, a man obsessing over his first love, or a family held hostage by their ogre of a son, the horror in each tale is palpable and build-up masterfully subtle. The growing sense of terror in each situation keeps us reading; in each case, the end always justifies the means.

The Houseguest left me feeling that what we call our reality is precarious and evanescent. Reading the stories in Mexico City during a week extolling the dead made them seem less daunting. You won't want to stop devouring the stories in this collection. For your own sanity, however, you will need to leave ever so often.