“Let me stay here," he said. "There was soap.”

“When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.”

“Horses frighten me as much as chickens do,’ he said.‘That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur.”

“The legal reporter came out of his cubicle shouting that two bodies of unidentified girls were in the city morgue. Frightened, I asked him: What age? Young, he said. They may be refugees from the interior chased here by the regime's thugs. I sighed with relief. The situation encroaches on us in silence, like a bloodstain, I said. The legal reporter, at some distance now, shouted: "Not blood, Maestro,shit.”

“The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.”

“In a solemn way, as if he had just thought of it, he said: The world is moving ahead. Yes, I said, it's moving ahead, but it's revolving around the sun.”

“That may be the reason he does so many things," she said, "so that he will not have to think.”