The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook) Read Free

He did participate, along with the now internationally known Reinaldo Arenas, in one of the most interesting cultural project of the 1980s, the
Revista Mariel
(1983–1985). In it, Rosales published the only interview he gave while alive and in which, besides discussing his double exile—from Miami’s petit bourgeois and from revolutionary Cuba—he makes a very revealing clarification about his characters that confirms the reading I propose here and that places the condemnation of the ravages of totalitarianism as the central theme of this novel. His characters, Rosales says, “are Cubans affected by Castro’s totalitarianism, human wrecks.”
    At some point in 1987 his friend, the writer Carlos Victoria, sent the manuscript for
The Halfway House
to the prestigious
Letras de Oro
(Golden Letters) contest, sponsored by American Express and with Octavio Paz, the Mexican future Nobel laureate, on the jury. Thanks to its obvious structural qualities and the cataclysmic power of the story, the book ended up winning. Nonetheless, nothing happened: the book had a luke- warm reception among Spanish-language critics and for years was known only by a few people.
    In 2002, the French edition published by Actes Sud with the title
Mon Ange
(
My Angel
) was a resound- ing success. The newspaper
Le Monde
praised it as “a spectacular autobiographical fable” as well as a “lyrical and lapidary” novel. The following year, it was reissued in Spain under the title
La Casa de los Náufragos
(
The House of the Shipwrecked
) to great acclaim.
    In 1993, the time of his death, Guillermo Rosales was forty-seven years old.

THE HALFWAY HOUSE

The house said “boarding home” on the outside, but I knew that it would be my tomb. It was one of those marginal refuges where the desperate and hopeless go—crazy ones for the most part, with a smattering of old people abandoned by their families to die of loneliness so they won’t screw up life for the winners.
    “You’ll be fine here,” my aunt says, seated at the wheel of her straight-off-the-assembly-line Chevrolet. “You’ll understand that nothing more can be done.”
    I understand. I’m almost grateful that she found me this hovel to live in so that I don’t need to sleep on benches and in parks, covered in grime and dragging sacks of clothes around.
    “Nothing more can be done.”
    I understand her. I’ve been admitted to more than three psychiatric wards since I’ve been here, in the city of Miami, where I arrived six months ago, fleeing the culture, music, literature, television, sporting events, history and philosophy of the island of Cuba. I’m not a political exile. I’m a complete exile. Sometimes I think that if I had been born in Brazil, Spain, Venezuela or Scandinavia, I would have also fled those streets, ports and meadows.
    “You’ll be fine here,” my aunt says.
    I look at her. She gives me a long, hard look. There’s no pity in her dry eyes. We get out of the car. The house said “Boarding Home.” It’s one of those halfway houses that pick up the dregs of society. Beings with empty eyes, dry cheeks, toothless mouths, filthy bodies. I think such places exist only here, in the United States. They’re also known simply as homes. They’re not government-run. They’re private houses that anyone can open as long as he gets a license from the state and completes a paramedic course.
    “…a business just like any other,” my aunt explains to me. “A business like a funeral home, an optician’s, a clothing store. You’ll pay three hundred dollars here.”
    We opened the door. There they all were: René and Pepe, the two mentally retarded men; Hilda, the decrepit old hag who constantly wets herself; Pino, a gray, silent man who just glares at the horizon with a hard expression; Reyes, an old one-eyed man whose glass eye constantly oozes yellow liquid; Ida, the grande dame come to ruin; Louie, a strong American with greenish-yellow skin who constantly howls