Eastern Freezer

The title of this anthology of stories by Mireya Robles, Eastern Freezer, is that of the first story in the book, which sets the tone for the entire collection. It is a futuristic tale set in an unfeeling, mechanised world in which the narrator finds herself after her death in the year 2273, where she had to sign an invalidation of her death certificate and an authorization of the validity of her new “birth” certificate. This is part of the process to become a “reintegrant” with a number: 47111. After a day of mecanised duties, she has to go to the Storage Area where she will spend the night in a niche. To her surprise, she recognises in herself “the old capacity for sleep” and her key ring still in her possession and concludes that “We always have something. This encouraged me to settle myself”, and accepts herself as “a complete and absolute 47111”.

The themes of uprooting and alienation are familiar in Robles’s work, and here they find a poetic expression in stories with a variety of settings, such as “The Parade”, in which a lonely man finds himself in the uncovered front part of an amphitheater where he witnessesses a hallucinating procession of robot-like creatures from the past, or “The Floating City”, possibly set in a Cuba of oneiric quality. Or in “The Death of the Tiger”, where the theme of alienation is carried the furthest, the protagonist, a tiger possessed by the soul of a man actually dies, stretched out “on that soil that could be fertile”. For in most of these tales the heroes remember a former, richer life and suffer at the loss of feeling, the meaninglessness and the absurdity of the present. Occasionally, one of Robles’s characters finds fulfilment, generally a child who discovers the world and once, a lover who, symbolically, finds her corresponding half. In “The Vampire who gives blood” the idea that love is possible is given its most poignant expression, even though fulfilment is followed by rejection. These stories of Mireya Robles are a cry of pain against a dreary and indifferent world and a plea for human warmth.

The style of these narratives reflects their theme. In the first story, “Eastern Freezer”, the narrator speaks in short truncated sentences similar to those of telegraphic language. Faced by the impossibility to express herself in that impersonal world in which all that is left of her former self is an old bag and a key ring, she often resorts to repetition: “empty…empty…empty”. On the other hand, in the passages where Robles describes warm human emotions, she uses a highly poetic tongue, filled with striking metaphors and unusual images. This is the case in stories such as “The Other Half of Time” or “The Vampire who gives Blood”. A few of the stories in this collection contain simple sketches of everyday life, such as that of a child involuntarily wetting herself during an inspection at school or of the narrator’s chance meeting with an eccentric passenger in a train. Such passages are infused with tenderness or with a gentle irony which provide relief among the texts where sombre emotions prevail. From the mundane to the surreal, the narratives in the anthology Eastern Freezer explore a broad range of experience and Robles’s characters confront feelings of love or grievous loss, of intense sexual sensitivity or of inability to feel and express themselves, but also of great tenderness for the weaknesses of human nature. Thus the reader gains access to the astonishing universe of the inner life. Robles excels in suggesting a complex world in a few lines, sometimes ironic, sometimes nostalgic, but always extremely acute.

Bibliography

Robles, Mireya. Eastern Freezer, English translation by Susan Griffin. Trafford Publishing, Victoria, BC, Canada, 2010.