Strategy, development and knowledge
This happened to me more than twenty years ago, when I visited Brazil. I have never told anyone and have tried to forget it, but I cannot. I suppose writing it down, describing it in as much detail as possible, might at least help me get it off my chest and make sense of it, even if that is impossible.
This happened in 1995, when I was seventeen. It was an ordinary Friday afternoon, and it was also Halloween. That was precisely why Felipe called: to invite me to a costume party that night.
My name is Günther Schreiber, and I am a coward. One cannot choose where one is born; being born in Berlin in 1942, in the middle of the war, might seem like an announced curse. Anyone would say my fate was sealed…
My name is Sayid al-Latīf al-Bāgdadī. I am a physician by profession, though more generally I am a scientist. Throughout my life I have devoted myself almost exclusively to acquiring knowledge; my profession has granted me access to countless libraries of caliphs…
I see Mariela’s bare back, fair skin dotted with freckles, brown curly hair falling like a waterfall down a mountain. Sitting on the bed, naked and vulnerable, Mariela contemplates the void, absorbed in her silence.
I am going to tell you about the most interesting person I have ever met. At the end of 2004 I rented a small apartment on Avenida Chapultepec, almost level with Sonora; it was a narrow six-story building with two apartments on each floor.
I met Natalia one April night in Parque México in La Condesa. It hurts to remember how in love I was with her; it was love at first sight, she obsessed me. Only a few weeks after we began seeing each other, on a cool dawn on my apartment roof…
My name is Bernardo Manzano; I am 37 years old. When I was 20 and studying engineering at university, I took a temporary job. A sheet posted in one of the faculty corridors advertised work conducting surveys in several towns, and it seemed a good way to spend the summer…
A weary cry in the middle of the night, the immediate fear of a piercing sound we have been conditioned to fear since the beginning of time. I imagine prehistoric people huddled in a cave and suddenly waking in the darkness to the same sound…
My name is Germán Gutiérrez, and I am fifty-two years old. I am writing this because it has obsessed me for the past few years and I have no one to tell, yet I feel an overwhelming need for someone else to know.