And That Garden Where Life Can Disappear, a novel by Santiago Cevallos

Abstract

I feel the presence of the impossible in our everyday lives with ever-greater clarity. No matter how hard we try to plan and fit our actions into structures that offer us a sense of peace of mind, what happens to us—directly or indirectly—is most often ultimately determined by factors beyond our control: unpredictable, unthinkable; difficult to accept even when they occur, and we say in amazement, “And this seemed impossible.” This feeling overwhelms us when we look back at the past, when we revisit who we were at a certain point in time and place ourselves once again in those circumstances: from there, our present—that is, the future we didn’t know was awaiting us back then—is revealed to us in all its clarity, in ways that were impossible to predict...