FICTION

THE DOORMAN by Reinaldo Arenas , translated from the Spanish by Dolores M. Koch (Grove Weidenfeld: $16.95; 208 pp.) . A Cuban refugee named Juan works as a doorman at a New York apartment building. Idealistic but melancholy, he believes that he is destined to lead people through a greater “door,” to happiness and spiritual fulfillment--if he can only figure out where it is.

Juan tries to discuss this with the residents but fails. They all have answers of their own, however neurotic: compulsive sex, cult religion, penny-pinching, spending, bullying, passing out candy, attempting suicide, substituting prostheses for body parts, even in one case (the most damning of all in the eyes of author Reinaldo Arenas, who was sentenced to a Cuban labor camp for homosexuality and expelled in the 1980 Mariel boat lift) worshiping Fidel Castro.

The residents are cartoon characters; it’s soon evident that Arenas is writing a fable. Sure enough, the doorman begins to hear the voices of animals--the residents’ mistreated and misunderstood pets. Unlike their masters, they are perfect embodiments of their own natures: the rat’s malice, the rabbit’s fear, the turtle’s serenity and so on. “How can someone be wise who isn’t even moderately happy?” they ask. “How can people be superior?” They call on Juan to liberate them, saying that his true mission is to promote a “total revolution” in which even inanimate objects will rebel against the human hegemony.

Last year, Arenas, 47, died of AIDS, just as his writing (“Singing From the Well,” “Old Rosa”) was gaining recognition in the United States. “The Doorman” was written in the mid-1980s--too early to be shadowed by his illness, perhaps, but reflecting the frustrations that he says most Cuban immigrants in this country share. Either way, something humorless, brittle and despairing infects this novel, despite its inventiveness and eloquence.