#51 Thurs (8/11/22) - Avelino Arredondo and The Wait

 Avelino Arredondo was written in 1975 and included in the Book of Sand collection.  It was written 25 years after The Wait, which appeared in El Aleph (1949). The Wait tells of a criminal on the run, who is hiding out in a northwest part of the city. The setting of the story is mostly a patio, a bedroom, a house, a street, that all become part of the prison holding a condemned man awaiting execution. It is a pensive meditation on time, death and the excruciating wait for the resolution. It ends in the anticlimactic death of the villain in his bedroom at dawn.

Avelino Arredondo tells a very similarly constructed story, in that is features many of the same settings and could just as easily be titled The Wait as well.  The name of the protagonist in this story is the eponymous title, but just who that is, we do not know, nor do we know why he is important enough to have this story told. As his wait progresses, we are led to wonder what he is waiting for, and we join in the anticipation, the desire to see a resolution.  The ending also features a shooting, but perhaps not the one we imagined.  The notes inform us that this is based on a true story, which in some ways heightens it perhaps.

Two lines stand out:

"Years of solitude had taught him that although in one's memory days all
tend to be the same, there wasn't a day, even when a man was in jail or
hospital, that didn't have its surprises."

"For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though
down a slight decline. .. Once he'd reached his goal, time
would cease, or rather nothing that happened afterward would matter. He
awaited the day like a man waiting for his joy and his liberation."

 

 


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