A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
brewed the mate. It didn’t last. This man didn’t build furniture or anything. One afternoon in June when it darkens early he pressed her against a wall and she screamed like a morning rooster and the watchman came around the corner and pulled off the scoundrel—he had to peel him off because he was stuck to my aunt—and took him prisoner to the station.
It was a brief and scandalous romance. I think there were others, but from a distance, until Don Sancho showed up and conquered her.
I loved Don Sancho the Spanish republican because he looked like Don Quixote de la Mancha.
I had a hardcover book with an image of the Knight of Rocinante the horse and Sancho Panza, but my aunt’s boyfriend didn’t have a paunch, he was skinny as a rail and so well-spoken that I wanted them to come to our house, both of them, for tea and the cakes that the boyfriend brought. But I wasn’t interested in the tea but in hearing the voice of Don Sancho. He told stories of his distant country which inspired me to paint and my ears overflowed with names of places like Paseo de la Infanta, Río Manzanares, and I imagined a girl in white holding a crown of flowers between her arms and the waters of the apple orchards loaded with dancing apples in the waves like the heads of cherubs which I painted.
Don Sancho gave me a fine porcelain doll that I was supposed to call Nené, the name of my aunt and his beloved girlfriend. My mom suggested that I was turning fourteen soon and that dolls wouldn’t suit me anymore. I put her on my bed and at night we embraced.
I understood that my fate hung over a sad cloudscape of melancholy rain when my mom launched my doll Nené while shaking out the bed sheets, shattering her charms and leaving me with a fever that took a long time to subside. I grew after that illness. Something ruptured inside me hurt. Pieces of porcelain from my doll Nené stuck to my liver and caused a nervous hepatitis and on top of that I learned to cry.
And I cried when Nené left her husband Don Sancho. One day I asked her why she didn’t fulfill her marriage vows. She answered that it wasn’t right to discuss intimate matters with me because since I was her niece I owed her some respect that there’d be time later on for spicy and dirty things.
I said that her sister, my other aunt, did spicy and revolting things with her husband and she told me to keep my mouth shut.
Translated by Steve Dolph
WORK
1942, Versos al recuerdo, Talleres Gráficos Olivieri & Domínquez (poetry).
1948, El anticuario, Ediciones del Bosque (poetry).
1948, Adiós desde la muerte, Ediciones del Bosque (poetry).
1951, El solitario, Moreno (poetry).
1953, Peregrino del aliento, Moreno (poetry).
1955, Lamentación mayor, Colombo (poetry).
1959, El ángel del espejo, Municipalidad de La Plata (poetry).
1959, Laúd, Colombo (poetry).
1962, La trova, Colombo (poetry).
1962, Panorama de afuera con gorriones, University of Texas (poetry).
1963, La pica de la Susona; leyenda andaluza, Hojas del Simurg (stories).
1963, Cuaderno de Angelina: relatos de infancia, Municipalidad de la Plata (stories).
1963, François Villon, raíx de iracunida; vida y pasión del juglar de Francia, Colombo (essay).
1964, Carta a Zoraida; relatos par alas tías viejas, Colombo (stories).
1969, Pogrom del cabecita negra, Colombo (novel).
1974, Jovita la osa, A. Peña Lillo Editor (stories).
1974, La Plata mon amour, Pueblo Entero (novel).
1974, Muerte del Lobizón y Pariciones, Colombo (poetry).
1981, Antología personal, 1940-1976, Ramos Americana (miscellaneous).
1988, Zingarella, Botella al mar (stories).
1991, Las Marías de Los Toldos, Ediciones Theoria (novel).
1994, Estos locos bajitos por los senderos de su educación, Pueblo Entero (essay).
1994, Poesía gauchipolítica federal, Colección Estrella Federal (poetry).
1995, Nicilina y las Meninas, Pueblo Entero (poetry).
1997, Hadas, brujas y señoritas, Ediciones Theoria (stories).
1997, 45 poemas paleoperonistas, Pueblo Entero (poetry).
1997, Evita, mester de amor, con Fermín Chávez, Pueblo Entero (poetry).
1998, Me moriré en París, con aguacero, Corregidor (novel).
1999, Lieder, Edicones Theoría (poetry).
1999, Ponce de León y el fuego, con Fermín Chávez, Corregidor (essay).
2001, Alma y Sebastián, Nueva Generación (stories).
2001, Venid amada alma, Ediciones Theoría (poetry).
2004, Racconto, Corregidor (poetry).
2005, John W. Cooke, Nueva Generación (essay).
2006, Bruna Maura-Maura Bruna, Nueva Generación (novel).
2007, Al pez, Libros El Búho (poetry).
2008, Las primas, Caballo de Troya (novel).
2011, Nosotros, los Caserta, Random House Mondadori (novel).
2012, El marido de mi madrastra, Random House Mondadori (stories).
2013, Los rieles, Random House Mondadori (novel).
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AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS
1948, Premio Iniciación for El solitario.
1958, French Iron Cross Award for her translations of François Villon and Rimbaud.
1966, Gran Premio de Honor Almafuerte.
1968, Premio Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz for Pogrom de una cabecita negra.
1969, Premio Domani for Nosotros, los Caserta.
1969, Premio Pirandello d’oro della Collegiatura di Cicilia for Nosotros, los Caserta.
2007, Premio de Nueva Novela Página/12 for Las primas.
2010, II Premio Otras Voces, Otros Ámbitos for Las primas.
Ramiro Pinilla was born in 1923 in Bilbao, but the center of his life were the summers he spent in Arrigunaga—a beach on the Biscayan coast bathed in the waters of the Cantábrico—near the town of Gexto. In his recollections, those summers are perceived as the most beautiful of his childhood, when he enjoyed a limitless freedom. Then September would come and with it, the end of happiness: he had to make the trip back to Bilbao and get ready for the start of classes at a seminary. Left behind were the cliffs, the sea, life itself: the beach where, as Pinilla has stated many times, life on earth began.
Later on, now an adolescent, Pinilla discovered that writing was one of the things he liked doing more than anything. To write and to read writers like Charles Dickens and Henry David Thoreau, whose philosophy he identified with right away: like the author of Walden, he too dreamed of living apart from the