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  • The Hexagon of the Conquest
  • Dagoberto Gilb (bio)

I didn't like books when I was young. Or, better said, I didn't play much with books and they didn't play much in my life. I played baseball and football and shot hoops when I could find one. I was good, one of the two who always picked sides on all elementary school teams. I lived in that dirty house in the neighborhood, the one where the yard wasn't mowed or edged, bushes overgrown, the neighborhood where I would learn, especially from other kids' parents, that divorced and Mexican were words that were dirty too and that kept me from having friends in neat houses. Then a new boy from another state moved in near enough when I was around twelve. My new friend wasn't athletic. He never talked about sports. I didn't care because at least I got to go over to his house, which was the dirtiest of them all, on a street with a traffic light, a house that was always for sale or rent. They rented. His mom looked like she drank, and his dad was a taxi driver. His dad, who was very quiet, sullen I'd put it now, lost his left arm working for the railroad. His dad could have been the one-armed man from The Fugitive! I never told my new best friend how I smiled thinking it, not once, but it was always sort of there, making me feel like I was closer to a TV show world.

My new friend didn't even care about sports. He cared about what I had never heard anyone else talk about. If I wanted to go look at bicycles at a store, he'd go with me blab bing about airplanes and space craft, flights to the moon and Mars. I liked Archie Comics, because of Veronica mostly, though la güerita Betty sometimes too, but he went for the superhero stories that were, well, too brainy and complicated for me. He knew dinosaur names and cared about science—he had both a microscope and telescope. He owned a few books, a used encyclopedia, and he knew about libraries too and he checked books out there. One time he walked me to his library, where I'd never been. It was a small local branch, with very few bookcases or books in it, though then it seemed otherwise to me, with big tables that we could sit in front of and spread out over. The library was a tense world to me, uncomfortable as maybe sitting for a meal at a family dinner table like people on TV shows did, as curious and unique to me as that. Different lightbulbs, air not from windows, only whispers and pages turning, and coughs, sneezes, and blowing noses. At first I looked at books he would show me with my eyes checking around me too, waiting for someone to criticize me for doing something wrong—I think now it was that strange feeling of time that really disoriented me, the hands on the clock moving either too fast or too slow. I looked, and I read with him, until suddenly I was initiated: I forgot where I was once I found a book on my own. We probably looked at it together, maybe or maybe not, because I only remember the book, which was about the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. [End Page 412]

Just think of them, or better said, the drawings of them in a children's book. The Pyramid at Giza, that obvious one of power, already as famous as the country of Egypt where there was the Sphinx too. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was so much more to me because we heard in school so much about the "fertile crescent," the rich dark land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where these walls and terraces held and nourished fruit and flowers that grew on them like ivy. There was Zeus in Olympus, a godman made of gold, so big his head bumped the ceiling when he took this indoor throne. There was the Colossus of...

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