The Belén Cottage
Belén is and always will be a stone cottage in the soul of the Córdoba hills.
Sturdy walls, like that embrace that held me as a girl, when I did not yet know that places love too, that some houses inhabit us long after we have left them.
There, the stream sang its secrets under the ancient gaze of the hills, among willows that brushed the water and espinillo trees that scented the air. The earth spoke softly and I, without knowing it, was learning the language of my roots.
The nights at Belén were a sacred mantle. The Milky Way stretched its arms over the hills and the sky, alight with stars, seemed more alive than the day. Beneath that immensity we were so small and, at the same time, so much a part of the eternal.
—I accept—retruco!—
And the veranda burst into life. The cards bore the marks of time, the hands, the memory of so many games, and voices crossed like paths that always meet again.
Conversation, shouts, jokes, toasts and laughter mingled. The grill burned with its eternal ashes, always ready to kindle another celebration. And between one cry of ¡aro, aro, aro! and the next, the bombo drum and the guitar kept setting loose songs no one had planned and that ended, so often, in tears of joy.
Outside, the night. Inside, the family. And in between, that way of celebrating life so much our own, needing nothing more than to be together.
Because Belén was never just a house. It was Grandpa, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my siblings. It was the sound of many generations making a little universe of one shared table.
It was the root sunk into the ancient earth, the refuge my heart returned to when the world hurt. A place where there was always room, where time seemed to slow its pace and life, for a moment, stopped asking so much of us.
Today the stone is still there, steadfast and generous, sheltering other lives, keeping within its walls the promise of new memories.
And though other voices fill its rooms, though other hands light the fire, something of me remains there, as moss remains between the stones, as the murmur of water never quite leaves.
Because Belén lives intact in my chest: beloved cottage, childhood home, temple of stars.
It lives in the scent of peperina, in the wild taste of piquillín, in the stream swollen after the storm, in the crunch of wet earth, in a horse's gallop and in the bombo that still echoes in some corner of my memory.
It lives in the guitar that calls us together, in the voices that rise, in the embrace that asks no questions, in the laughter that brings us back to who we were.
And when I close my eyes, I return.
I return to the hills, to the endless nights, to the veranda aglow, to the cards on the table, to my people, to that simple happiness that seemed ordinary then and that I now understand to be sacred.
Perhaps that is why there are places we never quite leave. Because they are not only earth, stone, water or sky: they are the embrace of those who loved us, the childhood that still breathes us, the part of us that time could not take away.
The Córdoba hills will always be that: a piece of the world my soul knows how to return to.
There, between the stream and the stars, between the scent of the hills, the condor's flight and the distant echo of a guitar, time slows, memory finds shelter and the heart, at last, rests.
*Belén: the place where I learned that some loves never leave. They stay in the stone, in the earth, in the blood.
And forever, in the soul.*
Victoria Inaudi January 2025