Commentary on The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales

Commentary on The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales

“The Halfway House” by Guillermo Rosales offers penetration into a world most people do not know exists.  It is a captivating, honest, straightforward viewing of the darker side of human reality.  The unfortunate end of those who fall through the cracks of time is expertly detailed by Mr. Rosales.  This is a frightening tale about the conditions of individuals who barely exist as humans.  It gets its realism from the actual life experiences of the author.  It is unimaginable how anyone could survive or eek out an existence in one of these “places.”

            William Figueras is no longer mentally viable.  He has arrived in Miami from Cuba to relatives who, upon discovering his uselessness, dutifully, resolutely and in an organized, matter of fact way, deposit him at the “boarding home”, assured that “nothing more can be done.”

            The encounters, circumstances and the souls that have been collected in the “boarding house” are beyond belief.  The horror that the denizens of the “boarding house” are enduring is what you find at the end of the road of life.  The cast of personages presented in “The Halfway House” is an array of feeble-mindedness and insanity.  There is: Reyes a man with a glass eye that drips with yellow pus and who urinates all over the “boarding house” as, William puts it, out of “revenge”; Rene and Pepe “mental retards” that inflict violence upon each other; Eddy, a Cuban immigrant that suffers with seizures and Hilda, “the decrepit old hag” who urinates on her clothes, to name a few.

            Arsenio and Mr. Curbelo are the demons who guard the inhabitants of the “boarding house”.  According to William, “I also think that you have to be made of the same stuff as hyenas or vultures to own this halfway house.”  This two-headed Cerberus presides over a reign of terror.  They steal money from the inmates’ government checks, and they burglarize their meager earnings.  They offer them crudely prepared concoctions construed as food.  The residents are harassed.  Their property is stolen.  They are raped, sexually abused and assaulted.

            The internees are trapped and have nowhere to go.  The only options available to them if they escape are jail and the street.  They are too mentally eroded to defend themselves, and they have been abandoned by their families and society.

            Deliverance from the “boarding house” proves to be impossible.  In a fleeting moment of hope, William manages to find a decent place to live and arranges to get his government check from the brutes that guard the “boarding house”.  As William leaves, his jailers call the police, and as Konerak Sinthasomphone was returned to Jeffrey Dahmer after he escaped the latter’s apartment, William is arrested and returned to the filth and stench of the last circle of hell on earth, the “boarding house”.

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