More on: Ricardo Pau-Llosa

A lost man might pour his jug onto the sand to feel one with the desert, and for that moment he is cleansed of heat and thirst. But freedom is not a moment’s craft. Pinned by memory, he will regret the gesture and the surrender. The sullen break of journey onto knees will not console…

What but poverty earned him your respect that when our fates were turned he is called to act as cruelly as I did then? Lot’s wife turned back in shock, in pity perhaps, and for this she was robbed of flesh and name. Why plant in us the startle and curious glance to countermand that…

And who looks like his passport photo, may I ask? The man often lost his cool at immigration counters and customs and wherever documents met metaphors of the frailty of life. Look carefully, officer, behold what a little less beard has done for youthfulness overflowing from a face no torment could mar? Yes, I see,…

Embarrassed by the awe he felt as a boy touching a mimosa shut along the vein, tiny leaves blinking into supplicant palms, the man came to understand that astonishment. Beyond vegetable with a reflex— didn’t venus flytrap also clamp, and don’t sunflowers turn?— he grasped the aesthetics of mimosa’s fruitless act, effect which refused its…