Hubo un jardín

The garden is a rational space of order and care, where nature is guided and chance is abolished—far from the dark jungle or the uninhabitable desert. In her seven masterful stories, Valeria Correa Fiz explores moments in her characters’ lives when nature—inner or outer—overflows: a slaughterhouse in a flood, an Eiffel greenhouse in the pampas, an apartment beside a cemetery, a hotel owned by Nazi sympathizers, a bar that once sheltered an anti-colonial patriot, Madrid’s Retiro Park, or Spain Park overlooking the Paraná River. The garden also evokes the Garden of Eden, a lost promise of bliss and perfection that we long to recover—because where a garden once stood, a question remains: why do we abandon the rational, ordering impulse that enables peaceful life? What dark forces, desires, or violences push us to relinquish that civilized space? Is the garden we were expelled from—or chose to leave—a lost paradise or one that never truly came into being?