RETALIATE

New York, June 27

I sacrificed a huge sum and have decreased my fixed income in a few million, but one
of the oldest fantasies of my youth has become a fact visible. The city has been
slapped, Nature has been avenged.
I lived for many years in awful rooms in the most populous of the most populous city,
dusty and murmuring the world. I hated the rooms, houses, streets, city. And I had no
choice but to live there. And I thought, fifty or a hundred years earlier, in the place of
those filthy alleys, those dirty, smelly mansions of those mazes asphalt and mud
meadows where flowers had opened to the sun, where the fruits ripened fields, the
Birds sang, ran hares and wind passed freely: open land, water saturated, fragrant
grass, healthy, quiet, hospitable to the homeless.And dreamed that a man rich or
powerful-dictator could enjoy a day on return to nature a bit, at least, of that
disgusting city, demolishing houses, desempedrando the streets and returning the
clean air where there was corruption, the marshes Bloom where sewers running,
silence where there was the rumble, solitude where thousands of men crowded into
overlapping brick tombs.
This thought led me, perhaps without realizing it, when I bought many houses in one
of the neighborhoods of New York. Instead of spending my money here and there in
the metropolis, gave orders to my agents only buy houses in that neighborhood. Over
time it would become taking an income three times higher. But when I realized I had
two or three streets, whole, and, except for a few isolated pieces, around the
neighborhood, I was struck with strange power, memory and also the temptation of
that dream.
The fantasy exceeded all calculations, I could not resist. Gradually I got to buy the
few houses that were not my property and I found absolute owner of twenty acres of
New York, more than eighty thousand square meters.
It took six months to make out all the inhabitants and ten months to tear down all the
houses.There remained in the rubble some roads over which he had no right. It took a
year of negotiations and authorities near the Municipality and the State of New York
for loaning these streets for my use. Not having as inhabitants, access roads to the

houses demolished were now useless. I had to believe that it would allocate to public
use the park, to do away with the last stand. Just was all in order, I acted as I found to
carry out my plans.
The twenty acres were surrounded in a altamuralla, no windows, gates and doorwaysentry for me is underground, and a headquarters of botanists, zoologists and engineers,
after three years of work, has made the miracle.
In place of the nasty neighborhood inhabited by laborers, small employees, small
shopkeepers, is now a sort of virgin forest with long forests, meadows and waterways
where birds sing, where trees flower, which is barely audible, distant and confused ,
rumor infernal city. Part of the land has been converted into zoo, lions and panthers
roar where the kids and chatted rattled the gossips. In the forest I have intended to
introduce hares, squirrels and hedgehogs, and no one has the right to kill them. The
plants brought here as adults, and defended the safest methods are as vigorous and
multiply to the point of being shady trails and picturesque maze: the illusion of being
away hundreds of miles of the most populated city on earth .
There are no houses, except for some hidden pavilions for gardeners and guardians of
the beasts. Who goes on the outside sees nothing, enjoys nothing, perhaps, at night, in
the neighboring streets you will hear the roar of the tiger or the song of the
nightingale.
I I have only this small earthly paradise regained. I do not invite anyone in or
anyone. I spent a major part of my capital to be admired or to hear compliments, but
only to please the boy who led, many years ago, my same name and suffered the fetid
heap and the narrowness of the city, and finally has avenged restoring to light at least
one piece of those fields that the men had hidden under ignoble cell cubes ...
In the streets where everybody went, do not spend more than me. Where howling and
stinking cars, the placid bears roam. Where the lender were stationed awaiting a
victim, jackal revels in the sun.
I paid, in the heart of a proud city, colossal, the real treat, the most expensive, modern
man: isolation and silence. Those who pass on the outside and the high walls are bare
and know what's inside, exclaim: "Caprice of a madman!

I, however, I have the feeling that I made in the precincts of a vast madhouse, a small
but cheerful wisdom cell.