CAFETÍN
DE BUENOS
AIRES.

As a little boy I watched you from outside, like those things one can never reach... My nose against the glass, in a blue of cold that only later, as I lived, became like my own... Like a school of everything, once I was a young man you gave me, amid wonders: the cigarette, faith in my dreams, and a hope of love.

How could I forget you in this lament, little café of Buenos Aires, when you are the only thing in life that resembled my mother... In your miraculous mixture of know-it-alls and suicides, I learned philosophy... dice... gambling... and the cruel poetry of thinking no more of myself.

You gave me a handful of friends worth gold, the very ones who breathe life into my hours: (José, the dreamer... Marcial, who still believes and waits... and skinny Abel, who left us but still guides me....). At your tables, which never ask questions, one afternoon I wept over my first disillusionment, I was born into sorrow, I drank my years, and I surrendered without a fight.