THE CHILD

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

ask: how is it possible to attribute to the experience of a small child such

terms as essence or being, which have been discussed in dense volumes
and abstruse language by philosophers like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas?
The answer is, however, simple, but difficult to swallow if you believe that
the discursive mind and the senses are the only modes of human
knowledge. The child perceives such things directly, as if he would taste an
orange or touch a piece of wood. It is partly the closing of the eye of his
heart and partly the utilitarian way in which he is conditioned to think
about language that make him eventually believe that numinous direct
experience is impossible and that the only way to approach being is by the
flattened senses, experiment or discursive thought. But for our child,
alone in his room, fascinated by the miracle of words, these were truly
magical spells, and the illumination of things perfectly responded to the
exact combination of sounds or letters.
The fact that he was learning to read in such a spontaneous fashion and
that his vocabulary was still so limited, also made it possible for him to
believe that language was able to relate not in a lineal fashion- to all that
he saw and experienced in the world. And this was much larger than the
physical. For he was at that age in which the invisible realm is beginning to
pale away, but can at times still be perceived: the light of angels and the
vibration of rocks and trees, and the depth and numinous qualities of
objects that he would later hear to be reduced to atoms and molecules.
Only a few weeks later, in bed, after his mother had kissed him good
night, he saw a figure of light appear by his bed. They lived in a flat in the
middle of a city but this was indifferent, because even among the hushed
noise of night traffic and the ugly modern buildings, that primordial figure
gradually manifested in the room until it could be perceived with enough
clarity. It had no smell or sound, but it shone forth with a wave of warm
purity, a mixture between his mothers embrace and the silver reflection
of the moon in a stream. The child didnt for a moment think about what
name to give to that being, but surely he was convinced that she had a
name and that, somehow, this magic word would bid her to return,
making her flow through the window to dispel all darkness, in an inaudible
lullaby of light. Little did he suspect that this would be the last time in
which the angelic realm would manifest to his eyes and that very soon, as
his proficiency for reading and writing cemented at school, the magical
qualities of language would temporarily fade away and the essences of
things would become hidden, opaque inside their form and their names,
as it is proper in the real world.