Goodbye, Chester Binder
About the book:
Starting a new school that has its own life and emotions; that is the challenge for Ángeles, the protagonist of this novel, which takes the form of a long poem infused with nostalgia about a childhood that has changed into something else. Together with her friend Chester Binder, she will revisit places whose echoes still beat in her heart. In this farewell, which is actually a new beginning, all genre conventions are blurred and the fleeting nature of memories is reinforced by the dreamy illustrations rendered by Anabel Fernández Rey.
Excerpt:
* To walk into
the house
that used to be mine
the backyard was
a stone playground.
My backyard
was the silence.
A boisterous sea noise
hundreds of kids
bumping into each other,
how could they
be happy
so early
I
remained
fixed
paralyzed
barely a few steps in
just to see
if
it still existed
a little further inside,
my apple tree.
It still existed.
At the heart of that playground,
surrounded
by hundreds of those loud kids,
strangers.
What were they doing
in my house?
why did they dare?
They had arranged
some bricks into a circle
around the apple tree
so that it wasn’t
ruined
by circumstances.
I got closer
so slowly
and confirmed
that it was surrounded by
a lump of earth.
The same earth
my feet
had trod on
before.
A bundle
of kids,
three or four,
packed
on that horrible
little wall
of bricks
to protect
the only thing
they had left
standing.
Me
and the tree.
The two of us
found ourselves
in what once
was our backyard,
now full of
strange screams.
But
the worst hadn’t happened
yet:
the sound of a bell stunned me
it filled
the entire playground
for a long while.
Translated by Sebastián Gutiérrez - Edited by Laura Estefania