The Invisible Story: A blog by Jaime Gamboa

The Invisible Story - Where did it come from?

When I look back on my childhood in the remote Guanacaste province, here in Costa Rica, I consider myself a lucky child., because every night my parents used to read bedtime stories to me and my brothers. Among those stories there were two written by Lewis Carrol: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which we loved. There were also many others from writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Charles Perrault, Oscar Wilde, Jules Verne, the Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga, and the Spanish Miguel de Cervantes.

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From hearing so many beautiful and moving stories, my brothers and I soon began to invent our own. Of course, we did not aspire for our stories to become as famous as the ones my parents read to us, but perhaps one day they might find a reader who would discover them. It was all about having patience. Even though we were still very young, we had already realized that not all stories, even the most famous ones, were for everyone, nor did they resonate with everyone in the same way. It's strange, isn't it? How can the same words mean different things to different people?

For example, each of my brothers had their favourite stories. One preferred a story by Horacio Quiroga called El Paso del Yabebirí, where lizards called yacarés blocked a large steamboat’s passage across the river. I, on the other hand, loved a story by Oscar Wilde called The Selfish Giant. And so on.

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As we got older, each of us began to choose our own readings. My older brother was a fan of Emilio Salgari, while I preferred Jules Verne. As time went by, we realized that libraries were like universes full of stars–like continents inhabited by millions of books, each one different from the others. We also understood that we would always have slightly different opinions about each book we read.

From that moment, I realised two things that would be very useful in my life, both as a literature teacher and as a writer. The first is that a story does not have to please everyone, and, in fact, it may not please anyone, but that does not mean it should disappear. Perhaps its time hasn't come, or the right reader hasn't yet found it. And the second is related to the first: the person who decides how good or beautiful a story is, is not the author, nor the editor, nor even the critic or the literature teacher. It is the reader.

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Since then, I have dedicated my life to creating adventurous stories that venture into the world to find their readers. And so, The Invisible Story was born. A story about a story written in a language that only very special readers can understand–a story crafted specifically for them, for their imagination and their sensitivity. A story that only they can discover with their fingertips. In short, it’s a story so tailored to blind people that not even I, its author, know what it is about. I only know that it is beautiful and colorful, but I will never be able to read it unless I learn to read braille.

I think my admiration for blind people and their ability to read with their fingertips is connected to my other passion: music. Since I was a child, I have also been immersed in other types of stories, those told in musical scores. To understand them you need to know how to read music. Fortunately, my parents enrolled us in a conservatory, where we learned to read music and compose it.

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The Invisible Story could also have been a score, waiting in the library for the eyes of a musician to discover it, and draw wonderful melodies from its pages. Or it could have been a book written in a foreign language, waiting for an immigrant, perhaps a girl from Syria or Gaza, to arrive and extract all its beauty. That is why, for me, the most important aspect about this story is not the anecdote it tells, but the desire it instills in the reader to learn the stories that only another reader, one with different abilities or one who knows other languages, can convey.

If we wish to avoid a flat, monochromatic, and boring world, the only solution is to welcome those other readers, to open the door to different perspectives, to value those that see things that we do not know how to see. Because the world is full of stories–varied and beautiful, like the leaves of a tree.