The final coincidence: one day after the arrival of the journal containing both the remarkable announcement that the 1985 Israfel Society Conference had been transferred from Baltimore to Beaunos Aires, my cat Aleph died. Not from any discernable cause, but merely out of consideration for the old bachelor who had taken him in. Aleph was the only obstacle to my making the trip, beacuse, now that my Aunt Raquel had gone into a home, there was no one I could leave him with. Aleph's death convinced me not to miss the never-to-be-repeated opportunity. Yet his all too convienient demise failed to arouse my suspicions.
Everything that happened to me in Buenos Aires I owe, in some way, to Aleph's death. Or to geographical destiny. Or to the God behind the God who moves the God who moves the players who moves the pieces and begins the round of dust and time and sleep and dying in your poem, Jorge. Or to the designs of an ancient plot set in motion exactly four hundred years ago in the library of the King of Bohemia. Or merely to the trapped animal's unconscious feelings of respect for a well-made trap and a desire not to disappoint the person who went to so much trouble to set it...
My role is to see, describe and, now, write about what I saw. Someone or something is using me to untangle the tangled plot over whose direction I have as little influence as the pen has over the poets who wield it, or man over the gods who manipulate him, or the knife over the murderer. A plot whose denouement lies in your hands, Jorge.
Or should I say "in your tail".