I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.

I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.

I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather—just twentyfour—heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.

I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.

I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.

I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book, and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, and loved your beauty with love false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars, murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

They both are convinced that a sudden passion joined them. Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Since they'd never met before, they're sure that nothing had been going on between them. But what of the streets, the stairways, the corridors — where they could have passed each other long ago?

I'd like to ask them whether they don't remember — a moment face to face in some revolving door? a "sorry" muttered in the crowd? a wrong number on the phone? — but I know their answer. No, they don't remember.

They'd be greatly astonished to learn that for a long time chance had been playing with them.

Not yet quite ready to turn into destiny for them, it drew them near and pushed them apart, stood in their way, and, stifling a laugh, jumped aside.

There were signs, signals, what of it — they went unread. Maybe three years ago or just last Tuesday a certain leaf fluttered from one shoulder to another?

There was something lost and picked up. Who knows, perhaps a ball already in the bushes, in their childhood?

There were doorknobs and doorbells where one touch had covered another beforehand. Suitcases side by side in the left-luggage office.

There was, on certain nights, the same fleeting moment — though blurry after waking.

For every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.