white day a labyrinth named school mannequin

“I don’t know why I did what I did, except that I wanted to experience something new, to follow whatever clues I might find to mysteries not yet apparent, as in the Sherlock Holmes stories, which I had just discovered. I was too ashamed to ask for directions, so I wandered, more astonished than frightened, for what seemed to me a very long time”. After a few blocks, I realized I didn’t know the way.

“I usually took the same way back, counting off the landmarks as I passed them, but that day I decided to change course. Then as now, I was easily distracted, and all sorts of things caught my attention as I walked back home in the starched white pinafore all schoolchildren were obliged to wear: the corner grocery store that before the age of supermarkets held large barrels of briny olives, cones of sugar wrapped in light-blue paper, blue tins of Canale biscuits the stationer’s with its patriotic notebooks displaying the faces of our national heroes and shelves lined with the yellow covers of the Robin Hood children series a tall, narrow door with harlequin stained glass which was sometimes left open, revealing a grim courtyard where a tailor’s mannequin mysteriously languished the sweet seller, a fat man sitting at a street corner on a tiny stool, who held, like a lance, his kaleidoscopic wares”. The school was one of many that I attended in my childhood, and stood at a short distance from our house, in the tree-lined neighborhood of Belgrano. “One day” “when I was eight or nine, in Buenos Aires, I lost my way coming back from class. From their standing point, they not only could see their mother but also could give her directions and guided her out of the maze. After about 45 minutes she still was wandering from one dead-end to another, while her children had already found the exit.

This woman entered a maze together with her children. When walking it you sometimes appear to get further away from the centre, but when you continue you get step by step nearer to the centre.” This is what she said: “When you enter a labyrinth, there is only one way that leads to its centre. A woman recently explained that there is a difference between a labyrinth and a maze.

White day a labyrinth named school mannequin