"The weather is good, it’s sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and open a book by Valery, possibly the writer most read by Mexican writers, and then you go over to a friend’s house and talk. And yet your shadow isn’t following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don’t notice, but you have, you’re missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire for just once on your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily , forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reintepret it or sing it."