El niño y el Basilisco

Manila 1945 a boy looks at the sea from the boardwalk turning his back on a destroyed city From a photograph of his childhood Luis Eduardo Aute glances back to discover what remains in him of those eyes of a child with which he looked at the sea With the battle of Manila as the setting a bloody contest that claimed the lives of more than a hundred thousand people the author remembers the boy who was and how from that tragic experience the figure of the basilisk began to stalk him a being mythological in the form of a winged serpent capable of killing with its eyes representing the adult world degradation and death