Going back to the neighborhood is an absence/ facing two mirrors/ one that can be seen up close/ the other from afar/ in the clumsy duplicated memory’. At three in the afternoon, Don Cristóbal was walking up the middle of the plaza, heading for San Diego, solemn and dapper, wearing a felt hat, an English court suit, a gold chain, patent leather shoes. Next to him Jonas, his assistant, was wearing the coat. The afternoon was not over, when they stumbled downstairs. They said that Jonás was a childhood friend of Don Cristóbal, but “fallen from grace.”
Plaza Victoria was the hub of the neighborhood. Cardinal point that joins the San Diego cemetery with the rest of the Historic Center. There were houses with noble coats of arms and others, shops, tailors, carpenters, tin shops, canteens, taverns, Master Ibarra’s cabinetry, the San Lázaro hospice, 24 de Mayo avenue.
Saturdays and Sundays the 24th burst into color and spread unusual shows: potion sellers, merolicos, snake charmers, fortune-telling parrots, fire-eaters, contortionists… Games in which the hand was faster than the eye.
The Duchess captivated us. Perplexed, we saw a painted woman’s head, blindfolded, sticking out of a dilapidated box. The trickster approached the naive and inquired about her sorrows, he asked the Duchess and she gave the omens in a shrill voice. One day we followed her. She was in her box on the back of a porter, behind the palabrero. In Santo Domingo the porter stumbled, fell and with him the box of the enigmatic woman, who had been nothing but a bent dwarf. That day our childhood ended.
A slow and useless rain falls on Victoria Square. On the corner is the house built by the hands of our carver grandparents. I think of the mausoleum that bears his name. None of us will ever see it again. ‘Childhood/ the one that was/ is still lost/ playgrounds were not like that/ they are reflections/ those children who play are already old/ and they go cautiously through life’.
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