Rodrigo Rey Rosa - Poco-loco

It begins neatly enough. Alicia, a dancer from Zurich attempting to find success and challenges in New York, needs a place to live. She seems like a nice girl, overwhelmed by the city but determined to make it work.

...she began to realize that young artists in New York did not necessarily enjoy all the comforts of modern life: the buildings were old, many had no lift, the furniture was often primitive, and mattresses rested directly on the floor. She also realized, a few days later, that hospitality soon ran out, and that the quickest way to find a place to live in the bohemian East Village was by looking on the notice boards in certain restaurants and bars.

Serious artist looking for studio space. How to find your spiritual guide. Percussion classes. We'll walk your dog. Massage: home visits. Bicycle for sale. Dancer looking for an apartment to share.

Chris Andrews' translation of Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa's prose is light and sure, with a touch of the hopeful intellectual and aspiring aesthete. Alicia's perspective is the dominant lens by which we view the others characters; she is smart but unsure, willing to make it work in the big city but there is a suggestion that she can be persuaded to take on problems that are not hers.

Alicia is interviewed as a potential housemate for Daniel Harkowitz, a thoroughly complicated character who sometimes believes himself as the Son of God and others times as Satan. And then there are times when he believes himself a mortal, shackled in the chains of reality like all the others. At any rate he knows he must lay the foundations of his new religion the same age Christ did, at thirty.

Daniel has taken to carrying upon his shoulder a black chicken he called Poco, “to which he spoke in a constant whisper”. Alicia's impression of Daniel is that he is unsavoury and strange, but she has no other alternative, and the rent is very cheap. We know his history, and thus our impression is that he is a thoroughly dubious individual, one whom it would be best to avoid completely. Alicia, oblivious but concerned, moves in and begins to clean.

...it occurred to her to clean up Daniel's room as well. It had a sweetish smell; he was in the habit of burning incense. His bed, like hers, was a mattress lying on the floor. The window gave onto the fire escape, where Poco was standing on one claw, attached to the iron grille by a fine chain, staring off into the distance over a dark sea of rooftops under the evening sky. On the wall above the bed was a poster of Baphomet, the Judas Goat, and against the adjoining wall, on the ground, a row of old books. She decided it would be wiser to leave it all as it was.

But after a while things settle down. Daniel is never home, anyway, and when he (probably) is, she is at classes. When they are together, the air is tense and strained, but they hardly ever are, so she begins to relax. Alicia is a sympathetic character; the tranquility of Rey Rosa's measured prose becomes menacing the more we learn of Daniel, and the more likely it seems that things will end badly.

The story comes to a head when, late one night, Alicia returns home to find Daniel there as well. He has received telephone messages suggesting she is looking to find another place to live – why could she possibly wish to do that? If there are any complaints, he can change. And the rent is so cheap. Later, Alicia creeps out to the kitchen to find the chicken mutilated, it's head in the refrigerator. Later, she creeps out again with her bags packed, ready to leave the house, but -

And then what happens happens, and the story ends. Oddly, the intense build-up of the oddly calm/menacing sentences reduces the impact of the climax, which seems a let down due to its inevitability. The reader wants a nicer, or perhaps even just a more unexpected, ending, but we get the most expected (and violent) ending one can imagine from such a story, and that's that. Rey Rosa subverts our expectations in a way that is nonetheless unsatisfying. Daniel is an intriguing character, and Alicia seems like a lovely girl caught up with the wrong person. It's a good story, strong, but too strong for its ending, which whimpers just as it tries to bang.

Poco-loco by Rodrigo Rey Rosa is a short story from Center for the Art of Translation publication, Two Lines - Volume XV: Strange Harbors

See Also

See Also

Other stories from the Center for the Art of Translation publication, Two Lines - Volume XV: Strange Harbors include:
---Schiff, Agur - There's Lots to See
---Suceavă, Bogdan - Our Years of Beauty

Index of short stories under review