If I'm asked for a memory, it would be a childhood memory; and the most memory of all, since it is in itself like a metaphor of memory, brings to the soul a pungent lemon smell. I was probably six years then. […] They used to buy me those minute volumes of the Pulga Library, in which I stumbled for the first time upon so many literary friends that have been with me since. One that especially marked me was The Gold Bug, by Edgar Allan Poe. […] There I learned about the first pirate treasure of my life, that of captain Kidd.

[…]

But above all The Gold Bug brought me the wonderful gift of sympathetic ink, invisible at normal conditions until its strokes reappear with the heat of a flame. The formula for sympathetic ink provided by Poe did not suit me, for it includes such enigmatic ingredients as: “zaffre, digested in aqua regia”(?) and “regulus of cobalt, dissolved in spirit of nitre”(??). But someone, perhaps my father or grandfather Antonio, told me of a combination more within my reach: eggwhites and lemon juice. I got my mother, the cook, the nanny and everyone in the kitchen working until I got in a little cup some of this enchanted mixture. I can still see it golden and sour, I can still smell it. With the school nib, dipping it carefully in the cup, I began writing I don't know what on a white sheet. Afterwards I brought a match near the sheet, in which you could barely make some stains of pale humidity: slowly, blurrily and brown, rose the hidden letters. They were incomprehensible, as if run by the tears of all my future cryings, but they appeared from nothing at the unsteady call of a lighted match. I think no other marvel of nature has astonished me this much. The experiment had such a chilling success that I didn't dare to repeat it…

I can't remember the message I wrote in that sheet, only the long chicken scratch of those letters coming out of nowhere. So this is sympathetic ink, I thought. Sympathetic ink, with which men's memory is written even after the death of the last pirate! I couldn't know it then, of course, but I do now. Everything that happens and even what does not happens, what does not dare or manages to happen, is written within us with sympathetic ink, invisible to the naked eye at normal temperature. But later, when least expected, some intimate warmth approaches the hidden inscription and it becomes again clear: dark and shaky, bathed in tears.

But this Lujanera I mentioned, who was Rosendo's woman, she outdid'em all, and by a good long ways. La Lujanera's dead now, seņor, and I have to admit that sometimes whole years go by that I don't think about her, but you ought to have seen her in her time, with those eyes of hers. Seein' her wouldn't put a man to sleep, and that's for sure.

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There is, for example, a performance of Czech mimes or Thai dancers at the theather where I go with my wife and a friend, and I know that once the show starts I am going to find it all marvelous. I am entertained, deeply moved; the dialogues or the dancers' motions seem like supernatural visions to me. I applaud wildly, and sometimes the tears well up in my eyes or I laugh until I have to pee; in any event, I am glad to be alive and to have had this opportunity to go to the theater or to the movies or to an exhibition, anywhere extraordinary people make or show things never before imagined, where they invent a place of revelation or communication, something that washes away the moments when nothing is happening, nothing but what always happens.

So I am overwhelmed, I am so delighted that at the intermission I rise up enthusiastically and continue to applaud at length, and I tell my wife that the mimes are a marvel and that the scene where the fisherman casts out his line and hauls in a phosphorescent fish half the height of the stage is absolutely fantastic.

In the end, humanity is nothing more than a meat sandwich between heaven and Earth.

Dictionary, let one hand
of your thousand hands, one
of your thousand emeralds,
a
single drop
of your virginal springs,
one grain
from your magnanimous granaries,
fall
as the perfect moment
upon my lips,
onto the tip of my pen,
into my inkwell.
From the depths of your
dense and reverberating jungle
grant me,
at the moment it is needed,
a single birdsong, the luxury
of one bee,
one splinter
of your ancient wood perfumed
by an eternity of jasmine,
one syllable,
one tremor, one sound,
one seed:
I am of the earth and with words I sing.

fans upon
whose feathers
love has scattered
its blossoms…

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend… I bow to them… I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down… I love words so much… The unexpected ones… The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop… Vowels I love… They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew… I run after certain words… They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem… I catch them in midflight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives… And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go… I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves… Everything exists in the word… An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her… They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long… They are very ancient and very new… They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower…

An aphorism is a compact, canned idea.

Reyes, the indecipherable providence
That doles out the prodigal and the scant,
Gave to some the sector or the arc,
But to you the total circumference.