Liquor Jack: Martín Adán: The Cardboard House

Muelle des Pescadores, Chorrillos, Lima, Peru: photo by Jorge Arias R., 16 September 2011

Winter in Barranco has already begun -- a peculiar, daft, and fragile winter that might just cleave the sky and let a tip of summer peek through. The mist of this small winter, affairs of the soul, puffs of sea breeze, the mist of a boat trip from one pier to another, the sonorous flutter of rushing lay-sisters, opaque sounds of Mass, winter newly arrived... Now, off to school with cold hands. Breakfast is a warm ball in the stomach, the hardness of the dining room chair on the buttocks, and the solemn desire in the entire body not to go to school. The frond of the palm tree hovers over a house: flabellate, gently somber, pure, pink, glistening. And now you whistle with the streetcar, boy with closed eyes. You do not understand how one can possibly go to school so early in the morning, especially when there are esplanades and the sea below. But as you walk down the street that traverses almost the entire city, you smell the perfume of distant vegetables in nearby gardens. You think of the lush, wet fields: almost urban behind you; limitless in front of you, between the ash and elder trees, toward the bluish sierra. Barely the outline of the first foothills, the mountains' eyebrow... And now you pass through the fields surrounded by muffled beehive sounds of fleeting friction over rails and a flourish of athletic though urban gymnastics. Now the sun grinds to golden a mountain peak and an ancient burial mound, a yellow knoll like the sun itself. And you do not want it to be summer, but rather winter vacation, tiny and weak, with no school and no heat.

Martín Adán (1908-1985): excerpt from The Cardboard House (La casa de cartón), 1928; English translation by Katherine Silver, New Directions 2012