Jacinto Requena, September 1985.

One day I asked him where he'd been. He told me that he'd traveled along a river that connects Mexico and Central America. As far as I know, there is no such river. But he told me he'd traveled along this river and that now he could say he knew its twists and tributaries. A river of trees or a river of sand or a river of trees that in certain stretches became a river of sand. A constant flow of people without work, of the poor and starving, drugs and suffering. A river of clouds he'd sailed on for twelve months, where he'd found countless islands and outposts, although not all the islands were settled, and sometimes he thought he'd stay and live on one of them forever or that he'd die there.

Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring each other.

Quim Font, Revisited

The next day I saw him (maybe I was unconsciously seeking him out), and I walked toward him, my steps very slow, very patient, so slow that sometimes the people going by in buses on the street may get the idea that we don't move, but we do, I have no doubt that we do, and when he saw me his lips began to tremble, as if just seeing me triggered some urgent message, and as he passed me I heard the same words again: Ulises has disappeared. And only then did I realize that he meant Ulises Lima, the young visceral realist poet whom I'd seen for the last time behind the wheel of my shiny Ford Impala in the first minutes of 1976, and I realized that black clouds had begun to cover the sky again, that above Mexico's white clouds the black clouds drifted, impossibly heavy and terrifyingly imperious, and that I had to be careful and take refuge in pretense and silence.

RULFO

The heat woke me just before midnight. And the sweat. The woman's body was made of earth, layered in crusts of earth; it was crumbling, melting into a pool of mud. I felt myself swimming in the sweat streaming from her body, and I couldn't get enough air to breathe. From her mouth bubbled a sound very like a death rattle.

I went outside for air, but I could not escape the heat that followed wherever I went.
There was no air; only the dead, still night fired by the dog days of August.

Not a breath. I had to suck in the same air I exhaled, cupping it in my hand before it escaped. I felt it, in and out, less each time...
until it was so thin it slipped through my fingers forever.

I mean, forever.

I have a memory of having seen something like foamy clouds swirling above my head, and then being washed by the foam and the sinking into the thick clouds. That was the last thing I saw.