Automatically translated from Basque, translation may contain errors. More information here. Elhuyarren itzultzaile automatikoaren logoa

How many cities fit into a park?

Behe Banda

29 July 2024 - 06:52
Last updated: 2024-08-19 13:50

My brother, following the stereotypes of his age, threw me one of those curious questions. “Where have the umbrellas entered?” I had to answer, I don’t know, I don’t know who has led them. Then my brother, as quickly as he throws himself, asked me: “Who stole the umbrella?”

We started the road to the Old Town without solving the mystery. Before I walked a corner, I was asked for the umpteenth time “Where is the Guggenheim?”: there the first clue. The second, more evident, is the herd that joins in the Plaza de Santiago; and in the center, there are the yellow umbrellas. Like the shepherd dog, from one side to the other, barking sheep by telling them stories of all corners: legends, stories or inventions, who knows.

Looking at them is curious: they remain immobile in any corner, like statues, looking at the relief, the flora and fauna of the people, as if everything were an anthropological issue. They circulate as if they were in another orbit, not in the counterweight, but in the cast. They seem to be moving within their space capsule, as if they were stuck to their orbit, as if a large force made interaction with the autochthonous ecosystem impossible. Just in case, they don't look in the eyes at the native fauna. As if they had no need to communicate with the locals, “thank you” is enough. Their intention is not to leave a trail in the city, at least in the real city, as they only touch the city they have created for them: souvenir shops, hotels, museums, walk with their new shoes. But the footprints of his passing tear this authentic city to the bottom.

"Two parks: the one that we form him and me; and the one that makes him a tourist, the one of the other children"

On the periphery it seems that at the moment we are safe, we keep at least the costly shanks that are supposedly built for the native fauna. But my brother doesn't know that, and they're totally attracted to his stereotypical interest as a child.

We've gone to the park next to the house. The two of them in the syrups and the tyroline, to see who was closest to the sky. After walking together, I left her alone and got to work as a monitor. Then I saw the lost north, not knowing where to look, as if the park were another. The slide has been hidden behind him, staring at a group of children. When they came down the slide, he chased them, but he didn't get too close, trying to conceal the silly thing he had done. It was the same stupidity, but it was not in the same park. The child in front of him has boasted that his peers were watching him, swollen and shouted at him by echoing the screams of his peers. Not my brother, he's tried to imitate, he's screwed aloud, but there's been no echo, not an complicit look. He looked at me, waiting. I smiled at him, in his park, and he went back down the path of the lonely satellite, in the park of others. Sometimes it seems that the autochthonous are other children and my brother is the star of the orbit itself, the other the flora and the fauna, and the sheep that does not find the umbrella. Lost sheep. Two parks: the one that formed him and I; and the one that made him a tourist, the one of the other children. As if inside a park there were two squares, inside a city two cities.

Fired by the movement's messages, I lost my brother's track, I saw a couple of balloons in the air and heard a couple of cries. Suddenly the little boy came to me running, “Can you tell the other guys not to get me wet? They're asking in another language and they won't understand me," he said. My heart has torn. And then a “I want to go home” that I haven’t been able to convince you to stay.


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