As a child I wanted things I couldn't have, but I didn't envy those who did have them. Every year he asked for an electric train in his letter to the Three Wise Men, and even before discovering the sad secret about them, he already sensed that that request was going to go unanswered. But since no other child on my street received that sumptuous toy, the electric train continued to be part of the same inaccessible world in which the movie heroes moved. Since the beginning of December, those trains began their circular journeys in the windows of toy stores, in their simplified landscapes of mountains, tunnels, bridges, stations with alpine roofs and miniature clocks. I looked at them behind the glass and the simple happiness of contemplation was so perfect that it made the idea of possessing what I contemplated superfluous. The intensity with which I looked at him made the electric train mine. We make the work of art, the book or the song our own without any need to own it. It is more of each one because it belongs to everyone and it belongs to no one. The aesthetic education of the child begins with toys, with songs and stories, and that is why in literature there is a deeper and purer root that is not that of the literary. I had not seen any train up close, and in my country there were hills of olive groves or vineyards, not mountain forests, but in the bell jar of the window the electric train and its landscape formed a sufficient model of the world, a vision at at the same time fantastic and meticulous that made the mystery concrete and gave an air of fable to an everyday street.
At seven or eight years old, a child already has full awareness of things but still inhabits a partially magical universe in which the possibility of wonder persists. Perhaps this was more so at a time when there were far fewer images, and certainly far fewer objects. It wasn't until I was 11 or 12 that I began to really become familiar with television. Things appeared before us with dazzling integrity. On the movie screens, emerging from the darkness, everything had immense dimensions and very vivid colors, often richer and more varied than in reality: the faces, the horses, the spurs of the riders, the plumes of feathers and the bodies. tans of the Indians who rode bareback in western movies. The depths of the sea to which the submarines descended were no less hypnotic because they were simulated in ponds in Hollywood studios equipped with turbines and fans to raise storms. In the radio there was the other mystery of the voices and sounds thanks to which the invisible became visible in the imagination.
“Only mystery makes us live. Only the mystery,” says passionately Lorca, who always carried with him like a primitive poet the impressions of original nature experienced as a child in the Vega de Granada. The mystery was more powerful than ever on Twelfth Night. The painted clay figures of the nativity scenes came to life and became life-size, although of ghostly consistency, to arrive with their entire procession without being seen by anyone, even though they were represented by the festive and never entirely convincing simulation of the parade in the sunset on January 5th. I can remember a previous time when those municipal and multitudinous parades did not yet exist, and therefore the party was even more intimate, made almost entirely of invisibility and expectation of the prodigy. Through those roofs with chimneys from which a spectral smoke of olive wood emerged at midnight and those high windows of attics and granaries would somehow arrive the stealthy entourage of the Three Wise Men, their pages, their busy and efficient servants, and it was It is possible that the hooves of their camels resonated on the cobblestones of our deserted and poorly lit streets with the same drumbeat as the herds of cows or the hooves of mules and horses.
But they warned us that reckless vigilance could frustrate the desired advent. I looked out of the corner of my eye at the window, with fervent impatience, with fear, and the street was the same as always at that hour, and the little square into which it ended, with its light bulbs in the corners, which served more to magnify the shadows than to dissipate them, but it was also the scene of something, an imminence more tempting because we were forbidden to see it. From the dining room came the murmurs of adult conversations, so strangely alien to the atmosphere of mystery and expectation that we breathed, in our dark room, perhaps with a streak of light under the door. It was a time in which adults and children lived in worlds very foreign to each other, like the European settlers in their villages and the natives in their huts, around their bonfires, singing and telling stories in a language that the whites did not know. The adults had very hard and busy lives and the children were very numerous and spent a lot of time together and without any supervision in the wild country of the street, boys and girls in areas contiguous but separated from each other, never mixing, not even in the games, nor in toys, nor in songs.
Without realizing it, we fell asleep, exhausted by the nervousness of waiting. We did not know that we were simultaneously educating ourselves in the double learning of mystery and patience, of enthusiasm and perseverance. We opened our eyes and it was not yet daylight, so we sharpened our gaze to distinguish things in that weak light, with our hearts beating very hard in our chests. Something could be seen, in the shadows, or behind a curtain. There was a step from shudder to confirmation, from vague and promising to tangible.
This is how it was going to be forever in life. The electric train never came, but I don't remember there being any disappointment, because I hadn't had any real hope either. A background of sense of reality moderated childhood chimeras. There appeared a box of colored pencils, a small tin boat that was wound up, a pencil case, a book, a board for the game of goose, and their very everyday appearance was touched with mystery because they were gifts from the Kings. What our eyes saw with the first clarity, what our hands touched, was the clear beauty of real things, the exceptionality of the common, the fullness of the senses that perceived it: the smell of rubber, that of wood of pencils, the touch and smell and the colors of the illustrations in books. Our wishes were not exactly being fulfilled, and it would not have occurred to us to demand anything, much less ask for an account for what was not achieved. The box of 12 colors was identical to any other and was also exceptional because it had arrived as a gift and by surprise, a more valuable gift because we had not expected it. Reading those books subjugated us more because they came from no one knew where, not chosen by us but by virtue of an inscrutable chance, which was always going to be the same one that would make us find most of the books over the years. the books, the music, the cities, and above all the decisive people in life. Only the mystery makes us truly live it.
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