Professional Documents
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He Child: by Emilio Alzueta
He Child: by Emilio Alzueta
by Emilio Alzueta
It was silence everywhere. The blackbirds and the finches sang around the
ash grove, and the breeze plucked its melody from the branches and
leaves. And yet it was all silence, because all of these sounds were woven
into a transparent stream of music, and what is music but a manifestation
of the harmony hidden in perfect silence? The child, who was sitting in the
park, cutting colored papers and sticking them in a canvas, heard and
understood this, not with words, but with the immediacy of being part of
it. He was no more than three or four years old and still enjoyed that
perfect comprehension that growing and schooling fragment and tarnish
until the blackbirds and the ash tree and the breeze become different
things that must be memorized and catalogued. But he was very small and
children their age are surely loved and educated, but hardly understood.
His grandmothers called his name from the chair where she was sitting
with a friend and the babys carriage. The baby was the childs brother,
and sometimes awoke in him a mixture of deep interest and extreme
dislike. Yet he was mostly unimportant, especially at this hour in which the
colored papers and the canvas created designs that kept the child
absorbed and oblivious to the world. Now Granny had called his name.
Only some months she would have needed at least three repetitions,
because the first sound would have fallen like a pebble in the stream of
music and silence. This time, however, it awakened him and made him go
to fetch his biscuits and juice. Then he sat again, looked at the words at
the top of the canvas, and read the first one. When people said his name
they didnt just address him, but seemed to be convinced that they could
conjure up what he was, but was that possible? It was this relationship
between names and things, between letters and sounds that was
beginning to fascinate the child more than anything else. On his way home
he would keep asking his granny about the meaning of the shops signs.
What does it say there? As if determined to crack that code of language
by himself, he would recognize the patterns of letters and astound the
adults by his ability to read words and sentences before having ever been
schooled in reading.
But the adults didnt know that, when he was alone in his room, he would
say: hand, bed, flower and felt how the essence of these things
jumped from their contours with the radiance of being. You will probably