Mario Delgado Aparaín

Children often dream of growing up as fast as they can. And grownups often dream of growing even bigger yet. For me, it was always the other way around. I was born in 1949 and I grew up in the northern part of Uruguay near the border with Brazil. I rode to school on horseback and I saw the ocean for the first time when I was eight years old. Whenever my mother went to some nearby town, she would bring me books with stories of adventures in far-off exotic lands, of men and women who fell in love and rode off to heroic battles, and of animals so loyal and intelligent that they could tell what their masters were thinking.

I still have my childhood dreams, and my childhood fears, too. For example, thunderstorms still make me feel that the safest place in the world is under my bed. And for some reason whenever I see a policeman I still smile at him so he won't arrest me.

But most of all, I have never shaken off my childhood dreams. For example, I dream of riding around the world on horseback. Somewhere along the coast, I will meet a fearsome pirate like Leandert van Rhijn. We will become friends and he will tell me all about his adventures so I can write about them. But my greatest dream is to sit down in a chair, lean back and fall over. When I do that, I will fall into the magic well of time. I will travel back to my childhood years and find the children that today have turned into mean, angry, lying, unfair, selfish grownups. I will show them how much nicer it is to be like us. And it's much more fun, too.

That is pretty much why I wrote the story of La taberna del loro en el hombro.