After ten years of use, we have abandoned it, and it has lost all capacity for resistance. Showing its image is an attempt to keep alive the great memories, the family scenes, and the house itself. It is about bringing reality into something as intangible as memory, so we can leave behind the reality that inevitably falls exhausted beside us. Why did we abandon it? We simply moved forty meters away to a larger, older, and also more uncomfortable house. But this old house from the sixties, seemingly more fragile, still stands; it has withstood the weather and the temporary abandonment it suffered when we began living in the “Casa Chica.” This house, for fifty years, was the family home where the generations who must now build or repair the structures on this site were raised. This inheritance gives its materials more resilience, which now seem to come back to life thanks to its occupation. The “Casa Chica” was designed only for a specific moment in life, like a kind of canned or preserved utility: compressed, promiscuous, and uncomfortably pleasant. But when a house begins to fall definitively, the problem is thinking about what is really worth keeping, what would be good to save from abandonment. Often, memories are enough. On the other hand, a restored reality—out of place—becomes annoying noise. That old world, reinstated, has that bittersweet taste that bothers us if it weren’t for its beauty and accumulated years. Because memory seems to be absolutely dependent on its sharpness, it ranges from digital hyper-reality to dreams, from the vividly strange to the familiarly blurry abandonment. Ten years for a house is not much, but for a “Casa Chica,” it is at least debatable; for a “Casa Chica,” maybe even less time is needed. The problem with this particular house is that it was built of stone, steel, glass, and wood; the problem is that its structure suggested greater resistance; it seemed to be a permanent installation. But a close look at its details would have understood that those materials were placed only because of a sense of opportunity very common in these lands; they were materials that were gifted, accumulated over the years, found, and their joints had been designed to push away the sense of novelty, to create an atmosphere of artificial permanence against the landscape of mountains and oaks. For this reason, a few months of neglect, a mouse, and a stone were enough for that world that inhabited around it to sneak in through a few holes and for that damn nature to consume it, reclaiming the place that had been usurped by the construction.
   In a few years, I would like to make from the remains of the “Casa Chica,” or at least in the place it occupies, a water well. The reflection of the snow-capped mountains on a still plane of black water would suit the whole ravine well; such a bottomless well would produce an underground sensation, anchoring the artifact to the ground beyond its real occupation, making it move to the memory of its new image...
   A few years ago, I traveled from Valparaíso to Philadelphia on a cargo ship, a journey that took 32 days round trip. During the journey, I read all of Vicente Huidobro – novels, poems, manifestos – and nothing but Huidobro, in two volumes, by the edge of a small square pool reserved for the crew. The pool was narrow, a seemingly bottomless hole, painted a dark blue identical to the color of the ocean in some stretches we crossed. Filled with seawater, it seemed like a piece torn from the sea itself. With each dive, you felt – if logic didn’t affirm otherwise – that you could pass right through, cross the entire thickness of the ship, and end up adrift in the middle of a circular horizon.
   Months after the trip, I visited the poet’s grave in the seaside resort of Cartagena on that melancholic Chilean coast. I remember the tombstone, strangely out of place, displaced by the theft of some curious person. It bore a phrase from Huidobro’s last poems: “at the bottom of this grave, you can see the sea”. When I first saw it, it was just a tombstone in the middle of a field. Later, I learned that the town’s municipality had placed white monoliths around it, enclosing the site with marine chains to enhance the atmosphere of the burial. Surely by now, the epitaph has lost all its surrealism.
   The “Casa Chica” will end up being a family story, perhaps a local saying if we’re lucky, a deep well of very cold water like that of the river that echoes at the bottom of its ravine.