El portero.

• Author: Hernandez Martin, Jorge

The life and work of Reinaldo Arenas reflect his determination to escape his own circumstances. "Reality," wrote this Cuban author, "is not in the terror one experiences but in the inventions that erase it." Arenas's work gives shape to that drive to transform the world and his environment through a lyrical and imaginary reinvention of history and reality. Once in the United States, Arenas set about completing his narrative "pentagony" begun in his native Cuba. The word "agony" that forms part of his project's title is not there by happen-stance: These visionary novels are chronicles of repression and poetic striving to overcome constraints and to dissipate the anguish caused by rigid moral and political systems.

The author's tragic life ended in 1990 and The Doorman, published that year, represents his final attempt at escape, this time from the kind of narrator he had created in earlier works to give voice to his poetic imagination. In contrast to Arenas's narrative persona, the "narrator" of the novel is not an individual but the Cuban community in the United States, which the author satirizes even as it satirizes Arenas. At one point, for example, when the "community" explains why it has decided to write the novel without the aid of well-known Cuban novelists, it directs the following barb at Arenas: "And as for Reinaldo Arenas, his declared and blatant homosexuality would contaminate every aspect [of the story] ... completely clouding over the objectivity of this episode." At the same time, the collective narrator's attack on the authors named displays a narrow-minded, pedestrian conception of art and morality.

Unlike Arenas's previous novels, such as Hallucinations (El mundo alucinante) and Farewell to the Sea (Otra vez el mar), which are set in Cuba and deal with the Hispanic world, The Doorman describes the life of a young man who has left his country and settled in the United States. Set in New York, it shows the writer's perspicacity in dealing with the idiosyncrasies of his own and other cultures. Although the main character's sexual conduct is not a source of conflict, as it often is in Arenas's works, he runs true to form by living a marginalized existence. The novel warns the reader that this is "the story of a young man who ... could not or would not adjust to this practical...