Memory

As a kid in Colombia I had a free subscription to La Pura Verdad — the Spanish edition of The Plain Truth, founded in 1934 by Herbert W. Armstrong and mailed out of Ambassador College in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. It was, unmistakably, evangelical literature: prophecy, end-times reasoning, a specific reading of scripture aimed at conversion. I was never a Christian. Nothing about the magazine’s theology took. And yet I kept reading it, issue after issue, because some of the articles were very good — well-researched, well-written, curious about the world in a way that had nothing to do with doctrine. …

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. …