What can I hold you with? 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 marble: 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 Perú, 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 explanationsof 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.