[Falcao]

To the reader:

If the pages of this book consent a happy verse, excuse me the reader the discourtesy of having usurped it before. Ours nothingness differ little, it is trivial and fortuitous the circumstance that you are the reader of these exercises and I its writer.
-- Preface to "Fervor of Buenos Aires"

There is a line from Verlaine that I will not remember again. Near, there is a street that is forbidden to my steps, there is a mirror that has seen me for the last time, there is a door that I have closed up until the end of the world. Among the books of my library (I am looking them) there is some that I will never open again. This summer I will be fifty years old; the death is wearing me, incessantly.
-- "Limits"

The coin fell down in my hollow hand.
I could not bear it, though it was slight,
and I left it to fall down. Everything was in vain.
The other said: there are still twenty-nine more.
-- "Matthew, XXVII, 9"

What is the sea? Who am I? I will know it the next day that follows the agony.
-- "The Sea"

The wet afternoon brings me the voice, the desired voice, of my father who returns and who is not dead.
-- "The Rain"

I am, tacit friends, the one who knows that there is no other revenge that the oblivion, or another pardon. A god has granted to the human hatred this curious key.
-- "I am"

[Buenos Aires] is a corner at Peru street, in which Julio César Dabove told us that the worst sin a man can commit is to breed a child and sentence him to this frightful life.
-- "Buenos Aires"

Soon I will know who I am.
-- "Praise of the Shadow"