Education

My father’s suitcase did not contain what suitcases are supposed to contain. Among the shirts and the papers there were books — small ones, the size of an open hand, with yellowed pages and covers that each promised an entire world: Buddhism. Secret societies. Nuclear energy. The series was called En 25.000 palabras, published by Editorial Bruguera of Barcelona in the early seventies, and its subtitle was not a marketing line but a philosophy: para el hombre que tiene prisa. For the man in a hurry. …

The Gershwin lullaby that opens Porgy and Bess sets its conditions fast: “Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-lookin’.” That’s the benchmark. Clear it, and luck is assumed. Don’t clear it, and the rest is—supposedly—on you. I don’t clear it. My father was not rich. My country—by most international measurements—is not rich. And yet, looking back across decades, I cannot pretend I walked the same terrain as most people around me. What I had was something more subtle than inherited money, and in some ways more durable: I inherited an architecture. …