Reseña

My name is Anita, and this isn't my story. It's the story of my sister Sandra, whom many called Sandy. The eldest, the strong, the warrior, the brilliant, the one with the broken back. She was baptized Sandra Jeannette Ables Benítez. Her married name was Title, then Kondrick, and for her literary career, she adopted the pseudonym Sandra Benítez, our mother's surname. She wanted to write a novel that she never started. She conceived it with a parrot that talked, that listened, and that knew more about humans than humans themselves. She imagined it as a way to atone for sins, to redeem herself, to laugh at life, and also to grieve with dignity. This story, or novel, was supposed to be her sixth. It was titled "Socrates," an unusual protagonist, a philosopher parrot who spoke as if he knew more than he heard. Sadly, it remained a thought and an illusion, because dementia came before the words.
She died without being able to write it. Death erased the words and the threads that already bound her story. My sister Sandra was many things: daughter, sister, wife, mother, writer, and doctor of literature. But she was a woman marked by loss. I, as her younger sister, as her silent witness, decided to write it for her. This story is called Socrates, as she wanted to call it; not as she would have written it, because no one writes like Sandra Benítez, my sister and writer, but as I felt it in her soul when she could no longer write it. It is a tribute, an act of love, a homage, merely an attempt in her honor.
I have tried to reconstruct, in my words, what she wanted to write.
This is a fictional story. It is a novel woven from the remnants of Sandra's soul, and from what remained disguised in her five previous novels, in her words, and in her characters. No one expects a parrot to speak, much less to think.
But in Ahuachapán, in a house called Los Sueños, where books smell of frozen time, and human voices recall stories and secrets, lives a parrot who hears beyond words. His name is Socrates. The parrot was raised and trained by a psychic, who taught him not only to speak, but to look deeply, to be silent with meaning, and to think with compassion.
He came to live within the walls where memories remain, to be welcomed by a woman named Sandra, the writer, the twin, the one who sought answers, the one who gave him back his wings.