Bestiary: Summary & Key Insights

I began with the story of Irene and her brother, two gentle souls living in their ancestral home, surrounded by memories and routine. Their life is simple, almost archaic: knitting, reading French novels, caring for their inherited house that feels eternal. Yet, the eternity cracks gradually, soundlessly. Somewhere behind a door, an unknown presence begins to advance. It never appears, never speaks, yet its encroachment is absolute.

The siblings respond not with terror but with resignation. They surrender room after room, retreating quietly, until at last they abandon their home altogether. For me, this story was never about ghosts; it was about possession in a metaphoric sense—the way habits and complacency can be invaded by forces we fail to name. It speaks also of cultural repression, perhaps political, perhaps psychological, but undeniably Argentine: the presence that grows unnoticed until it dictates our exile.

Writing it, I felt the weight of the unspoken—the thousands of small fears we accept until they consume us completely. The characters’ calm is their tragedy; their politeness toward the unknown is what destroys them. The house stands as a closed country or a mind yielding to invisible domination. It is a meditation on how reality, when too controlled, attracts chaos in silent revenge.

This confession, written as a letter, was my way of turning absurdity into intimacy. A man temporarily lodging in a friend’s apartment writes to her in distress, describing his unbearable condition: he vomits rabbits, live and delicate, one after another. The act is grotesque yet strangely tender. He feeds them, hides them, tries to reconcile this impossible secret with the elegance of Parisian normality. But the apartment itself begins to rebel against the lie. The absurd becomes unbearable, not because of the rabbits but because social order cannot endure such deviation.

Through this surreal image, I explored guilt and alienation. The rabbits are symptoms of displacement, the residue of a self that refuses assimilation. To live in another’s space is to inhabit borrowed identity, and what cannot be digested must finally be expelled. In this story, the fantastic is the manifestation of inner disturbance—the foreign body of conscience. By the end, the narrator’s collapse feels inevitable; his apology becomes a confession of failure to belong. For me, this story captured the painful comedy of living under surfaces, maintaining politeness while one’s own spirit is multiplying in secret chaos.