Set mainly in an economical seventeenth-floor apartment in Buenos Aires, The Delivery follows an unnamed narrator as she goes about her day, working up a story for an advertising agency and assembling a proposal for a creative writing grant. Following her estranged mother’s emergence from a sealed delivery crate, she also has some unexpected catching up to do. This chamber piece, which chronicles the narrator’s various procrastinations, succeeds thanks to its voice, its pacing, and its glaring omissions.

From the start, the narrator’s cynicism forms a subterranean current throughout the text. Good intentions aren’t worth much in The Delivery; neither are family ties. “My sister likes to send me packages,” she reports. “It’s ridiculous, because we live so far apart and most of the things she sends get ruined on the way.”  She continues: “My family is her. And my mother, but I don’t have any contact with my mother.” Elsewhere the narrator bemoans the “invisible bond[s] that sometimes seem like an invention, sometimes like a warm embrace, other times like a straightjacket.” These jabs at familial ties, questioning apparently unbreakable and necessary relations, are, more often than not, all too relatable. 

The narrator is equally cynical about romance, pointing out the moments when lovers ‘imitat[e] happiness” rather than “feel it.” Falling back on romantic and familial conventions is painted as a sort of interpersonal weakness, a falling into “a dance of ambiguity that ruin[s] anything.” In isolation, these sharp quips are sharp garner her some support, but collectively they become a barrage of cynicism.

There is at least a degree of self-awareness, however, which endears the narrator to reader. Although she skirts around the topic, her emotional insecurities do eventually come to the front. As a friend tells her, “your sensitivity is blocked like the plumbing of an old house.” An immigrant living alone in an apartment complex full of untrusting neighbors, the narrator feels cut off from the world. Her isolation takes its toll. “I like silence, but it loses its charm when it’s practiced by one person,” she says. Her troubles are only exacerbated by the impassable social barriers that any immigrant faces:

It doesn’t matter how many years you spend in a place, doesn’t matter how much your accent has adapted, or your vocabulary: if you don’t understand the jokes then, you don’t speak the language, you don’t get the code, you don’t belong. And the next phase is even worse, when you understand the jokes by dint of repetition, or through basic deduction, but you don’t think they’re funny. In a room full of laughter, you’re the only one frowning.

Caught between unconquerable cultural differences and her familial issues, she is confronted with a range of problems that don’t appear immediately solvable or obvious. Her frustration shades into anger, which she finds easier to accept than the sadness that underpins it. “I detest sadness,” she says, “it’s so presumptuous. I’m more familiar with anger.” 

The narrator of The Delivery expends a great deal of effort on activities that serve to distract from her other, less tractable problems. Remembering to replace the bulb in the floor lamp, or staring out at the half-finished office building across from hers, help to ward off the real problems that are eating her up. She admits as much when talking about Axel, one of her lovers:

His hand grabbed me by the nape of the neck and carried me to face a giant creature that I had decided to ignore, and he made me kneel down in front of it: come on, look at it close, feel the appropriate feelings.

It is refreshing when confessions fall from the narrator’s lips, as when she finds that she loves Axel: “words came out of my mouth […] like a discovery.” But The Delivery is more generally concerned with what is unsaid, the conversations that take place between characters who are not speaking “though it’s obvious that they are talking in silence.” Early on, the speaker finds her mother in her apartment where the previously impenetrable crate has been disassembled. No explanation and minimal probing follows. It is the story’s only surrealistic invasion, and by virtue of its disappearance the crate lingers over the whole text. Perhaps an allegory of the narrator’s tendency to avoid her problems, it is an excellent narrative device that derives its power from its apparent insignificance. Robayo doesn’t need to linger on it—she knows the reader will do the work for her.

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Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia, and now lives in Buenos Aires where she teaches creative writing and works as a journalist and scriptwriter. She is the award-winning author of the novels Fish Soup and Holiday Heart, as well as several story collections. First Person, a book of autobiographical essays, is forthcoming from Charco Press. 

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Megan McDowell’s translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her translation of Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home won a 2013 English PEN Translates Award, and her translation of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. She has been awarded residencies by the Banff International Translation Centre (Canada), Looren Translation House (Switzerland), and Art Omi (USA). She lives in Santiago, Chile.

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Colm McKenna is a secondhand bookseller based in Paris, France.