The Red House

It they may ask me,
what a luxury house is for me?
Any house should be
a palace for its owners.
And a palace, nothing more
than a house with some privilege.

Sometimes, the privilege is
the view of a mountain range,
the sea, or a group of trees.
Other times the privilege
is having the morning sun
enter through your window,
or the silent neighborhood
that allows you to rest,
or the darkness of the night
that lets you see the stars;
or a friendly neighborhood full of children
playing freely in the street,
or the proximity of a square,
the children’s school,
or your daily workplace.

The generous space full of corners
may be a privilege of those kind
that my mother used to find useless,
the high ceilings of old houses or schools,
where one wanders when distracted,
the wooden planks of floor and stairs,
that creak with footsteps or heat changes,
the rain that hums on the wooden tiles,
as Neruda says, “with his violin language”.

Perhaps, gloomy silent spaces are a luxury,
almost bare of furniture, inspired somehow
in the architecture of pre-Columbian America,
like the outdoor rooms
of Chan-Chan’s palace in Peru,
or the ball game halls of Chichen Itza or Uxmal
in those Mexico Mayan cities,
or the town squares of such small towns
as Caspana, Toconce or Ayquina,
in the Chilean northern highlands.

Even if you can’t live for the moment
in such a house,
just imagining its interior is a pleasure,
that invites you to day dream beyond,
having more and more things,
and bigger ones. Sometimes is better
to make the best with less.