A PLEASURE TO HAVE KNOWN YOU…

In the Republic of Postponements, the official coat of arms shows a pelican perched atop a scale whose pans are perpetually empty. The national motto, in macaronic Latin, promises: Tomorrow Without Fail.Baltasar Valdivieso Quinones, a seventy-year-old retired doctor, finds one morning in his mailbox an official letter containing a single line: A Pleasure to Have Known You. No one knew him. No one had read anything he had submitted. No one, at any verifiable moment, had been in contact with him.What follows is the story of what he witnessed while awaiting a response that never came.A swamp guardian who lives in the swamp he protects. A secretary of development who organizes weddings. A plastic baby that speaks at legislative hearings. An electric company that inherited the ruins and billed for not repairing them. A justice system that archives whatever is inconvenient, starting at the letter N, in an order no one can now explain. An invisible river running beneath the capital's streets, always feeding the same gardens.An iguana who watches everything from the ceiling and who, in three years, spoke exactly twice.A Pleasure to Have Known You is a political satire built with the tools of magical realism: the comedy of bureaucratic absurdity, the clinical precision of the witness who does not look away, and the question no official communiqué answers: what happens when a system is so perfectly designed not to work that it works perfectly?

Pages: 434, Paperback, Independently published