The Marguerite Garden of Nona Luisa

By Juan Pedropablo

   The sweet fragrance of the otherwise odorless Marguerite Garden of Nona Luisa puts the whole neighborhood under a strange spell. The Magic and the Real intertwine in the process of reading almost as the memory of a dream intertwines with reality upon waking. The book contains mysterious toads, an absurd secular ritual of listening to snails, the end of the world, the vice of smoking, playful reminiscences of childhood, as well as daily poems written to the beloved. To the only Love, with millions of stories and names. A refreshing saga in which even Destiny and Karma are Elements of the Magic constituting the corpus of this narrative that the author masterfully set. You will read The Marguerite Garden of Nona Luisa And Other Stories in one sitting, all the while walking through numerous psychological and philosophical spaces of the human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Juan Pedropablo
• Release date: Jan 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393850137

Book preview

The Marguerite Garden of Nona Luisa

And Other Stories

Juan Pedropablo

INSCRIPTION

––––––––

To that special BEING, present in every moment of my Life, and with which I am ONE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

––––––––

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

––––––––

I would like to thank all those who are part of these stories in one way or another. To my grandmother Romilda, to my grandfather Chin, to my brother Diego, to my soul sister Mariela. To my two beautiful children José and Pedro. To my father and my mother. And thank you to all those who made me See and Make Sense of an uncharted part of me.

THE MARGUERITE GARDEN OF NONA LUISA

––––––––

... and when this scent poured over the damp soil...

It was a beautiful, odorous Marguerite garden, teeming with motley bouquets of Marguerite daisies, and the iron fence that surrounded the garden was foolish enough to think it could ever capture it. It was the Marguerite garden of Nona Luisa. Rumor has it that in the afternoons, when the old woman would water the Marguerite daisies after washing the tile sidewalk, a foggy mist rose from the wet entrails of the garden, giving away a smell of damp soil, which was enriched with a vague fragrance of a loneliness of ages, and invaded the entire neighborhood, putting it in under a strange spell. And the Marguerite garden was the only companion of that tiny old lady, so along in years and wrinkles that her presence alone evoked silence. Her face, which the passing years had turned into wrinkled meat, it bore the semblance of the eternal. Her walk, it attracted looks that later sought the sky. But aside from this gestural consideration, no one ever spoke to her, not even a single word that would invite her to the conversation that usually occurs between neighbors while they’re standing in some corner of the street soaking in the morning sunlight. They ignored her with devotion, fearful of the ruthless truth that would reveal itself when the flesh gets tired of life.

Yet sometimes, in the neighborhood, between the claptraps and chit-chats, someone would incidentally bring up the old lady's house, a mental image that, lacking form, made them uneasy. Then, they would make an effort to describe the house of Nona Luisa. Engineers and scientists saw a stable and well-built house, as they tend to rationalize everything. Artists and bohemians liked to point out that the house was a perfect example of French baroque. On the other hand, the bourgeois and conservatives brought up English picturesqueness. But the only certain thing was that nobody ever really saw a window, or a door, much less any other thing that would qualify this construction as a house. Someone once said that the speculations regarding the style of the house were nothing more than mere subconscious projections of bits of utopias or ideals that the fragrance of the Marguerite garden evoked in the afternoon fug of the reality.

At that time, everything that was new enjoyed the devotion normally intended for God. Legends, word of mouth, all of it transcended the borders of the neighborhood. A rumor occurred in the neighboring areas that young people from the neighborhood that was home to the Marguerite garden were all nymphs and Casanovas, as a certain magical fragrance forged a virility of a stud. And young men from distant horizons pined over the footsteps of the girls, who besides being beautiful, kept the secret of the scent of love in the depths of their eyes, as was believed. Poets also came to the neighborhood trying to rescue the dreamlike muses from the technological sophistication. The neighborhood attracted neat businessmen looking to loosen up, as well as lovers of all ages who strolled with self-confidence, taking pictures by the truckload. Anyway, it could be said that the neighborhood lived through the Marguerite