I walked again along the narrow sidewalk where roadwork was being done and went down the wide boulevard. Because of the dust raised by the heavy machinery, the lights of vehicles appeared hazy to me, and traffic lights, spaced apart from each other, pulsed above the smoky horizon of the large boulevard—the largest in our city.

I waited a few minutes for the bus, and after five stops, I got off right at the entrance to Tringa’s neighborhood. The old prefabricated apartment buildings added sadness to the night, and each balcony painted differently seemed to try to cover up the shame of those ugly buildings that belonged to another time and reality.

Somewhere, I had read that communist architects deliberately designed the small apartments so people wouldn’t have the chance for critical thinking or privacy, and without privacy, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to form individual opinions or to conceive of any possible revolution. They knew that the path from thought to action was very short, so they took care to make the homes resemble traps. And I remembered the novel I read, Life in a Matchbox, which attempted to explain in its entirety the impact of these boxes of concrete and lime on the collective psyche of the citizens of my country.

This was the greatest crime against humanity that the dictatorship had committed: to narrow spaces, to surround oneself with old walls, and to never have, for a single moment, the illusion of space and horizon within oneself. The small windows only added to the pain, offering just a limited view of the world.

Everything that existed out there and came through the windows was limited. In a certain way, along with life, they had also diminished our illusions, and consequently, our dreams.