Hubo un jardín

The garden is a rational space of order and care where nature is directed and chance is abolished. Gone are the dark jungle or the uninhabitable desert. The seven masterful stories by Valeria Correa Fiz explore different moments in the lives of her characters in which nature (her own or external nature) overflows: a slaughterhouse under a deluge, an Eiffel greenhouse on the pampas, an apartment next to a cemetery, a hotel owned by pro-Nazis, a bar that was an inn for an anti-colonialist patriot, the Retiro Park in Madrid or the Parque de España facing the Paraná River. The garden can also be understood as the Garden of Eden that symbolizes the lost possibility of bliss and a state of perfection to which it is a question of returning because where there was a garden the question remains. Why do we abandon that rational and ordering action that enables peaceful life? What dark forces, desires and violence overwhelm us and drive us to lose that civilized space? Is the garden from which we were expelled or from which we decided to exile ourselves a lost paradise or a half-built one that never finished getting up?