The Secret Room

SECRET ROOM

I have always liked the idea of secret rooms in old houses that almost no one knows exist because of architectural issues, incomplete or misleading wills or simply because of some disturbing family secret. Some years ago, I was teaching summer classes at a Spanish language school for foreign students. Like many places in my city, this school was located on the second floor of an old downtown house. One could enter by a side alley, while the entrances of the attached shops were on the first floor with access from the street. At the bottom of the alley, there was a service stair that allowed us to climb up to a series of rooms, some of them with views toward the alley and others, to the street. One of those was my classroom and I must say that it was quite pleasant because there was plenty of space, the ceilings were high and airy, and there were wooden beams and French windows. To access my classroom each day, I had to pass through a corridor leading to a patio with beautifully forged railings and connecting rooms less fortunate than mine. Out of some whim, the owner had covered the patio with fiberglass sheets so that some rooms had little or no light and it was like passing by a series of mining tunnels. All of the rooms opened to the patio, including one that was particularly intriguing to me because its doorfront consisted of a wooden Moorish latticework. I could just peek through one of its star-shaped wood perforations and glimpse a fragment of the room’s darkened ceiling. I never saw anyone enter, nor saw it open. Each day I grew more and more fascinated by this mysterious place. I longed to know about it, go inside and settle down. I never dared to ask the secretary for the key, afraid that I might be stumbling into some taboo, a forbidden place where gruesome events had taken place, a cursed chamber of some sort. Or was it simply the place where people kept boxes of books and other dusty things? And my request for the key would just seem ridiculous?

el mercado antiguo o visitando monumentos, bibliotecas, tiendas de de artesanías o de dulces tradicionales. Una de éstas se encontraba precisamente en los bajos de nuestro edificio. Hacia el final del curso llevé a todo el grupo a curiosear y a comprar dulzores de recuerdo. Ya dentro de la tienda, al fondo a la derecha vi la escalera principal de la casona; inutilizada claro, porque el piso de arriba era nuestra escuela y no había comunicación. Me acerqué y lo que descubrí me perturbó primero y me dio risa después. La escalera estaba clausurada a medio tramo. Se veía sin embargo, su parte superior… que no era otra cosa que mi supuesta habitación secreta. La celosía que yo tomaba por una puerta, tapaba de hecho la caja de la escalera. Y la habitación que yo anhelaba descubrir y conocer era sólo eso, una escalera clausurada para dividir dos locales comerciales. La imaginación es magnífica arquitecta.

— Lirio Garduño-Buono

*(del libro de cuentos Ciudad chica, ciudad grande, beca PECDA 2019 publicado con el permiso de la escritora. )

The weeks went by, my students were quite nice and I was working steadily, teaching them our language and our history. Sometimes the class took place outside in the colonial alleys, at the old market or while visiting monuments and libraries, at handicraft booths or traditional sweet shops. One of the latter was right below our school. At the end of the program, I took my students to that shop, so they could buy some sweets to take home. As we entered the shop, I saw in back the main staircase of the whole house. It was unused, of course, because the area above was our school and there was no way of reaching it from the shop where we were buying our candy.

I moved closer and discovered something that disturbed me at first and made me laugh later. The staircase had a barrier halfway up. But you could still see up beyond at a dimly lit area that was nothing other than my supposedly secret room. The Moorish door opened directly onto the stairway I was looking up into. The room that I longed to discover was in fact just that, a staircase shut down, in order to separate two commercial spaces. The imagination is a magnificent architect

—Translation by the author and Sterling Bennett

*(From the book of stories: Ciudad chica, ciudad grande, beca PECDA 2019 published with the permission of the writer.)