For fans of Margarita García Robayo, the premise of her latest, The Delivery, superbly translated for anglophone readers by Megan McDowell, may initially feel familiar. Set in Buenos Aires, the novel is told in first-person present tense by a nascent female writer originally from coastal Colombia. She is estranged from her mother, and the only connection she has with family back home consists of biweekly Zoom conversations with her older sister, who regularly sends the narrator care packages. As the story begins, the latest package — a heavy crate — arrives at the narrator’s apartment shortly after her sister leaves for a vacation. The protagonist initially ignores the oversized box, but it dismantles itself one evening to reveal the woman’s mother, who says nothing of her journey — nor of the emotional distance separating them — and begins acting in ways reminiscent of a stereotypical mom: cooking, cleaning, and worrying over her daughter.
García Robayo has explored several of these narrative ideas before. Her 2012 novella, Waiting for a Hurricane, follows a young Colombian woman yearning to escape the trappings of her family and coastal community. In García Robayo’s story, “Fish Soup,” a barkeep spots his dead wife wandering his establishment. Another short, “Better Than Me,” details a strained relationship between a father and daughter, and García Robayo’s last novel to be translated into English, Holiday Heart, plays with the idea of foreignness, centered as it is on a married Colombian couple moving to the U.S. and dealing with conflicting stances of rootlessness regarding their homeland.
Yet despite these narrative echoes, The Delivery avoids becoming a retread of García Robayo’s previous fictions. Instead, the novel stitches together elements from the author’s bag of tricks to construct something new, and the result is a mature, darkly funny rumination on family and what it means to call a place home. García Robayo packs the slim novel with ample narrative threads, and she seasons her prose with image patterns and inventories that enhance themes and subtly shape characters.
In opting to write the novel in present tense, the author introduces immediacy into each scene. This suggests an ambiguity that helps sell the unusual premise. Since the narrator’s sister is away on a cruise, she cannot contact her to ask about the package, and as the entire novel unfolds in about a week, the narrator never concretely establishes if her mother is tangible or completely imagined. Beyond initially chalking the woman’s appearance up to “one of those tiny fissures in reality through which seeps something that later on … we call ‘delirium’,” she has little time to ponder the corporeality of the figure before her, for she is juggling a hectic life. She is in a romantic relationship with a photographer, Axel, and is the de facto caregiver for her apartment building’s pet cat, Agatha. She freelances for an ad agency, has recently had a falling out with her best friend, Marah, and she occasionally keeps an eye on her neighbor Susan’s son, León. She verbally wrestles with other neighbors and the aggressive homeless men that haunt a local park, and to top it off, she is in the process of applying for a grant in Holland that, if accepted, would pull her out of South America for at least a year.
Thanks to this overload of stimuli, García Robayo deftly dances around any logical questions that might otherwise bog down her story. Little time is spent wondering about the reality of the old woman or why she was sent. Rather, the author shuttles her protagonist from one scenario to the next, often with her mother by her side, and it is these interactions, and lack thereof at times, that form the core of the novel. Added to this is García Robayo’s terrific use of image patterning to keep aloft the concepts of parenthood and family throughout the story. Early on, the protagonist defines what she calls “the fallacy of kinship,” explaining:
“My theory is that the awareness of the blood relationship is enough to convince people that kinship is an inexhaustible resource, that there’s enough for everything: to join opposing destinies, to twist people’s wills … But it’s not enough, not at all. Kinship is an invisible thread, and you have to picture it constantly in order remember it’s there.”
Taking this declaration as a missive, García Robayo injects her pages with images of people, situations, and language that hint at such emotional ties. The narrator acts as a caretaker for Agatha the cat, and she babysits young León. In addition, from her terrace, she peeps through the window of a loft across the street to watch a couple with a baby. When out with Axel one day, the couple run into his parents at a grocery store and the protagonist notes the changes in her boyfriend’s behavior. Eloy, her boss at the ad agency, calls her “kiddo,” a term she associates with “paternalism and irritation,” and late in the novel, she references a friend’s abortion.
Juxtaposing these images of kinship (or, in the last example, anti-kinship) are instances that remind the narrator that she is a foreigner while living in Buenos Aires. Eloy teases her for calling a coffee shop a “café” rather than a “bar.” He laughs at jokes that the narrator doesn’t understand, leaving her to confess, “if you don’t understand the jokes, you don’t speak the language, you don’t get the code, you don’t belong.” At her apartment building, the doorman tells her, after she hires men to deliver a large sofa, that “things aren’t done like that here. By ‘here’ he meant his country, which isn’t mine.” And when she attends community meetings, she observes that others drinking mate naturally assume that she, too, enjoys the beverage, saying, “No one ever asked me what I did drink.”
When combined, these dueling patterns press against each other, driving García Robayo’s protagonist deeper in her search for connection with her mother (as well as her quest to decipher what the woman wants to tell her after years of silence) while simultaneously explaining the disconnect she feels toward kinship, particularly when living in a country that refuses to fully welcome her into the fold. The images shape her character, but furthermore, they form a narrative thread for readers to latch onto, if only subconsciously, as encounters and memories flood the protagonist’s life. And when one final twist is revealed in the book’s closing pages, the patterns prevent the twist from causing whiplash, for they have naturally prepared the protagonist to face that which awaits discovering.
Another narrative device that García Robayo employs wisely in The Delivery is that of inventory. At several points, the narrator lists objects within various characters’ homes, and these records speak volumes in establishing personalities. When describing her own bedroom, she mentions “books on the bedside table, hair ties, a notebook, a pencil case, condoms, arnica cream for tired feet, sandals.” The items do well to illustrate the young woman’s hopeful career as a writer and her active love life, but they also imply an existence that isn’t quite one of luxury, requiring her to walk rather than ride. Similar minutiae are mentioned when the narrator steps inside the apartment shared by León and his mother, Susan: “There are a few decorations placed carelessly: a plastic Buddha, an empty napkin holder, the waving golden cat. There’s a low table covered with bills, worn crayons, and a teacup full of beer.” Here, García Robayo reinforces Susan’s established personality as an overworked single parent. More interestingly, though, the inclusion of the Buddha and waving cat insinuate the character’s own longing for life beyond Argentina. While the protagonist acts as if she and Susan live worlds apart, García Robayo’s list proposes they share a sense of wanderlust. The only difference, of course, is that León prevents Susan from acting on the lure of relocating.
Finally, when the protagonist spends the night at Axel’s apartment, she records the surroundings quite differently: “I look around his house: the gray sofa, the wooden steps that lead to the second floor, to his bedroom, his bathroom full of shampoos that smell citrusy; the tall windows with frosted glass; the ceiling lamps, white like the walls, which are strangely empty for a house of a photographer.” Rather than focusing once more on unique details, García Robayo elects to construct the inventory of the lover’s space via general attributes, resulting in a cooler reception to the character. He remains something of a mystery, and his quarters reflect that persona.
Narrative techniques aside, The Delivery ultimately succeeds thanks to Margarita García Robayo’s dedication to the fractured relationship between daughter and mother. While ultimately ending ambiguously, their story nevertheless sparks copious questions about family, love, and connection in its 160 pages. The Delivery is García Robayo’s most confident work to date, culling the concepts of the author’s previous fiction to present a surreal tale grounded in a recognizable environment. “How quickly the shell of routine is shattered,” the protagonist proclaims early after her mother’s arrival. “Any routine, however solid it may be, is obliterated by the unexpected.” By throwing her characters off their typical paths, García Robayo continues to show readers that she is one of the brightest voices in Latin American literature.
[Published by Charco Press on October 24, 2023, 164 pages, $16.95 US paperback]