My mother said that once, after playing with my neighborhood friends, I came home muddy from head to toe. That she did not challenge me, because she saw me absorbed by something that worried me. I would examine my hand as if it were something worth studying, and in the end I came to a fatalistic conclusion: "How dirty is the human hand!" From her laughs, and those reiterated by the guests at the house when she told them the story, I was learning something that I always had a hard time understanding: that I was not the center of the universe. With these stories, I feel like the world was reduced to me again. That it was again as small as the one in my childhood. That my hand is the human hand again. And who seeks shelter and company in other hands, as tiny as the one I had and have again, identical in their candor and innocence.