Como decíamos ayer

Como decíamos ayer is the phrase Fray Luis de León is imagined speaking upon returning to teaching after five years in prison. In Frank’s imagined walk through Salamanca with Vera and their five-year-old daughter Sonia, it turns a historical saying into a child’s comic, intimate reckoning with time—and gives shape to a family outing that never happened.

The phrase in Salamanca

Frank pictures the family walking from the square between a church and a Renaissance palace toward the House of Shells, then on through the city’s university quarter. In this hypothetical itinerary, Sonia encounters Fray Luis de León’s statue in the Patio de las Escuelas. Vera would explain that he had once taught at the university, had spent five years in prison for believing something different from what the Church taught, and returned to his students with the words Como decíamos ayer.

The phrase’s force lies in the disproportion between its ordinary wording and the years it bridges. Fray Luis’s “yesterday” would follow five years of silence imposed by imprisonment; for Sonia, who is five years old, those same years amount to nearly her entire life. The imagined exchange lets the saying hold both a historical interruption and a child’s still-forming sense of duration.

Sonia’s interpretation

Sonia would laugh because, to her, five years could not plausibly count as yesterday: they were as many years as she had lived, which was already a very long time. Her response makes the phrase funny without dismissing what Fray Luis endured. Instead, the child’s scale of time brings the weight of imprisonment close to the scale of a life she can understand.

Frank imagines Vera answering Sonia with another question, as she usually did when the child did not understand something. Vera might ask why Fray Luis said “as we were saying yesterday” after five years in prison. Sonia might answer that he was trying to forget those sad years, ask something else, or turn her attention to the decorated university façade. The scene remains conditional rather than remembered fact, but its imagined dialogue shows how the phrase could prompt explanation without closing down a child’s curiosity.

Memory and counterfactual family life

The phrase occurs within Frank’s recollection of what might have happened if Sonia had not died in an accident. He imagines that he and Vera could have attended the Salamanca congress with their daughter, and that their walk would have included the university and its surroundings. The imagined conversation about Fray Luis is one detail in a much more extensive alternative day: Sonia might run ahead, notice the façade’s carved figures, and explore the University Museum beneath its blue, constellation-covered ceiling.

As a remembered saying inside an explicitly unrealized family scene, Como decíamos ayer joins public history to private loss. Its return-after-absence structure echoes the family life Frank can picture but cannot recover: the phrase resumes a lesson after years of interruption, while Frank’s narration can only reconstruct the walk that the accident prevented. The account does not make the imagined outing real; its tenderness comes from holding that possibility and its absence together.