mermaid revisited

I went to buy books for a child.

Children no longer read what I used to read because, they say, it would throw them into trauma.

The bookstore recommended several: one addressed fear of the dark, another respect for animals.

They were books with a purpose.

I thought of

, Andersen's tale in which a heavenly-voiced siren saves a prince from drowning, falls in love with him, and makes a pact with the sea witch that gives her legs in exchange for becoming mute and giving up 300 years of life. life that guarantees the existence sirenil.

Things go from bad to worse: the prince doesn't fall in love with her, to get his mermaid tail back he must kill the subject —who has married another— but he can't find the strength to do it and throws himself into the sea.

Although Andersen says that he "turns into foam," it is suicide.

My grandmother read it to me in a collection of highly condensed illustrated classics — eight centimeters by six — called

Verne, Kipling, Stevenson.

illustrations

they are superb, voluptuous.

They filled me with imagination and curiosity (you can see her breasts) but I never knew who had made them: these books do not bear the signature of the cartoonists.

For years,

it had for me the ovarian and magical plasticity with which a stranger had endowed it.

The other day I looked for the book and, after decades, I set out to investigate who was the author of the drawings.

It took me five minutes.

Because at the scene of the shipwreck I discovered, smuggled in, the signature of Juan Arancio, an Argentine cartoonist who lived modestly in the province of Santa Fe. Then, as if I had been lying in wait, I heard the voice of my grandmother reading that story to me in the dark winter happiness: "In the deepest part of the sea there is a fabulous city."

Dylan Thomas wrote: "The ball I threw when playing in the park/Hasn't hit the ground yet."

You may never touch it.

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