Abstract
Lying in State (‘El cuerpo presente’) is one of a group of five stories written in 1967. The stories are closely inter-related, sharing themes, events and characters. Central to them is Chepé Bolívar, the telegraph operator. Twenty years before his death, with which this story is concerned, he entered the mythology of his remote peasant village by apparently refusing to transmit a message warning government troops of an ambush by revolutionaries. In fact, we learn, this seeming heroism was more likely due to paralysing cowardice. After the event Bolívar himself retires into a state of haunted semi-insentience, laboriously making and decorating his own coffin, helped by the equally enigmatic schoolteacher, Cristaldo. Roa's stories examine the co-existent banality and mythic significance of such events in the oppressive life of the village, and also the frailty and ambiguity of both memory and literary narrative in determining their true meaning.