In an unnamed country, after an ambiguous event, there’s an anonymous narrator living in a nondescript house in an undisclosed neighbourhood. After whatever happened in the past houses no longer have basements. What they do have is a room for the unknowable president on the longshot expectation that he may visit. This is The President’s Room (2015, tr: Charlotte Coombe, 2017) by Ricardo Romero and it’s a puzzling work that keeps its secrets close while inviting all manner of interpretations.

In vignettes we see a family home through a child’s eyes. With no sense of the adult world his account reveals little and we have to pick at his phrasings to glean any information. When he talks of “houses owned by people like us” there’s classism without further elaboration. He knows he has privileges, because others do not. But he doesn’t know what these are and wonders if anyone who enjoys them does.

The family life is full of hinted history, odd fevers and is dogged by the frequent disappearances of the narrator’s younger brother. A mysterious stranger’s visit suggests shady political intrigue. Indeed, at school the only referenced person is “the boy the president visited” (“afterwards he had a fearful look about him”), which it follows, when the president visits our narrator, becomes an act of baton passing.

The needs of the president are just as abstruse. Why does he need a private room in every house? Should we assume he’s the president of the country? Given what he’s witnessed him doing there, what purpose does his unheralded visit serve? Potentially his room could representative how a dictator occupies the heads of his citizens, but it could just as well be anything else, such is the book’s deliberate looseness.

It’s a strange but toothsome blend of body and abode that explores the space and dimensions in both. “Houses shouldn’t be touching all the time”, he says, alongside “my body is always touching something”. At night he says the house’s only heat is from his body. And: “my skin is a wall and I don’t know what’s on one side and what’s on the other”, which is what it’s like to approach this oblique book with pages on one side and a story on the other.