What is the summary of Paseo by Jose Donoso?

Answer 1

"Paseo" is one of Donoso's most superbly crafted stories and probably the one most frequently acclaimed by critics. Here the author employs the techniques of the first-person narration and the embedded narrative as he juxtaposes the perspective of a young boy with that of an adult narrator. Reduced to its core, "Paseo", is the story if an adult as he remembers and tries to comprehend the circumstances that surround the turning point in his childhood: the disappearance of his Aunt Matilde. Before that momentous event but after the death of the boy's mother, his Aunt Matilde and two bachelor uncles had come to live with him and his father so there would be a woman to care for him. Their home life was characterized by physical comforts and reassuring routines, epitomized in the ritualistic billiard game each evening. Although the family acknowledged the existence of the world outside the confines of their "perfect" home, a world evoked by distant foghorns and lights but always perceived through the filter of a window, that "other" world never infringed upon theirs, where the fortuitous and the unexpected had no place. In fact, heaven is imagined as an exact replica of their house (78/212). In the family's carefully delimited world, screened from the outside by windows, walls, and fences (both physically and psychological), misfortunes such as hunger, cold, discomfort, poverty, or weakness were perceived only as "mere errors in a world that out to be-no, had to be-perfect" (76/210); the emphasis is Donoso's). The self-correcting gesture is significant. More important their "perfect" house is imaged in relation to a book: "narrow and vertical as a book slipped in between the thick shapes of the new buildings" (75/208). However, it was a closed book-"that deep house which, like a book, revealed only its narrow spin to the street" (76/209); it never opened itself up to the threat of the exterior, and it hid as much as it revealed, not unlike "the thick [library] door [that] screened the meaning of their voices" (73/205). The perfection of this prelapsarian structure was apparently broken by the appearance of a small white dog. To the boy, the dog heralded the beginning of the disintegration and chaos: first Matilde stopped playing billiards with the brothers, then she forgot the shooting order, later she laughed (perhaps for the first time), and finally she walked the dog each evening. Those "walks," excursions beyond the confines of their neat, ordered, bookish house into the outside world, eventually led to the final, title "Paseo" and Maltilde's "disappearance." Although her disappearance is incomprehensible to the narrator, he does define it as the end of the secure, neatly ordered, ritualistic life he had known up to that point: "I went to bed terrified that this would be the end And I wasn't wrong" (94/230). He was terrified because, as he noted in the preceding sentence, he had realized that his aunt has her whole life before her and was capable of anything. Surely that included turning her back on the established order, opting not to continue caring for the males (narrator, father, and uncles), and leaving them to perpetuate their own structure and order. While there can be no question that they do reinstitute that order, they accomplish it in part by imposing a self-serving blindness and refusing to "see" anything that might threaten it. This blindness and the narrative correcting factor that signals it are apparent throughout the story. For example, although the narrator posits his aunt's disappearance as a major threat to, indeed as the termination of, the status quo, he subsequently negates that concept and assures the reader (or himself), "Life went on in our house as if Aunt Matilde were still living with us" (94/230) his confidence quickly falters, however, and in the next statement he corrects himself by noting that the brothers began to meet regularly behind the closed doors of the library. One of the recurrent elements of the text is this self-correcting tendency that leaves the reader dangling over a void of ignorance paralleling that of the narrator. In fact, the story might be read as the dramatization of order reestablished by means of the act of narration. Nonetheless, Matilde's disappearance is never labeled as such, for it can be encompassed by none of the terms with which the narrator is familiar. In the story's title it is euphemistically designated by the unthreatening term "Paseo," and within the text he simply concedes that she "never came back" (94/230). By not naming the event, the narrator silences it (and blinds himself to it) much as the brothers do, in both cases in order to avoid "the useless terror of having to accept that the streets of a city can swallow a human being, annul it, leave it without life or death, suspended in a dimension more threatening than any dimension with a name" (73-74/206)-threatening precisely because it does not have a name.