Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado

Memory from Childhood

M E M O R Y FROM C H I L D H O O D A chilly and overcast afternoon of winter. The students are studying. Steady boredom of raindrops across the windowpanes. Recess over. In a poster Cain is shown running away, and Abel dead, not far from a red spot. The teacher, with a voice husky and hollow, is thundering. He is an old man badly dressed, withered and dried up, holding a book in his hand. And the whole children's choir is singing its lesson: "one thousand times one hundred is one hundred thousand, one thousand times one thousand is one million." A chilly and overcast afternoon of winter. The students are studying. Steady boredom of raindrops across the windowpanes. [>9l 2 ...