He was and is a père, my last desperate envoy bent on un-misunderstanding by citing a quotation Virgil had placed inside a book by Lafargue (Oh Melibee, God has given us this tranquility). And while he guided Dante through bucolic circles near Pignola, of the Fierros, my friend Cécile, who was so compassionately my only littérature professor at Tours' unforgettable Université François Rabelais, took me by the hand to show me Baudelaire's carcass blooming upon Ronsard's rose branch. But we should not forget that other friend, Cecilio, ever-present in the poems of Fierro and whose own published poems were shorted the merest attention of a canalized, disoriented criticism... mère of invention.

Everyone, like two friends talking, enjoying responding in eclogues, trying to win at words, amoebaean singers, lazing in the shade, making woods resound with lovely Amaryllis. Everyone, pursuing pursued languages and fleeing the pursuers, descending fearlessly into hell, following Alfonso, equipping ourselves with Virgil, feasting upon the marrow of lions. And now, before new anti-poetry onslaughts, let us all read Reyes' Hellenic stretch of warning in hope that his iodine words keep away infection. If not, a water hose and a cane should do it.

Our digestifs in hand we toast about the poker table with Wittgenstein who discusses in depth luck's importance in a first reading and the humiliation of a capicú win in dominoes. But that rumble was the rhino he sensed in my text Friday 11, that hendecasyllable day, an ill-fated sum now, resisting painfully. "Viva ut vivas," say the Mannings, but I wonder, along with Neruda: How long lasts a rhinoceros after being pacified?

There's a library in a house on Cebollatí Street to which Wittgenstein never paid a visit. Russell however did, and William as well, the latter leaving almost all of his works, transferred to Spanish, so that a father could sign them off with love to a mother whom he courted many a glorious morning till a thousand times good night. And on a table there's a copy of that Bible of the Bear stamped with the signature of a sister, a sister who accompanies her brother always: The Nácar-Colunga and the Jerusalem (how many false friends Hebrew must have!) called around much later and to this day there they wait, in a house on Cebollatí Street, in Montevideo.