Who shall read Jean-Pierre Duprey in the year 2059? Who shall read Gary Snyder? Who shall read Ilarie Voronca? These are the questions I ask myself.

Who shall read Gilberte Dallas? Who shall read Rodolfo Wilcock? Who shall read Alexandre Unik?

A statue of Nicanor Parra, however, shall stand in a Chilean square in the year 2059. A statue of Octavio Paz shall stand in a Mexican square in the year 2020. A rather small statue of Ernesto Cardenal shall stand in a Nicaraguan square in the year 2018.

But all statues tumble eventually, by divine intervention or the power of dynamite, like the statue of Heine. So let us not place too much trust in statues.

Carson McCullers, however, shall go on being read in the year 2100. Alejandra Pizarnik shall lose her last reader in the year 2100. Alfonsina Storni shall be reincarnated as a cat or a sea-lion, I can't tell which, in the year 2050.

The case of Anton Chekhov shall be slightly different: he shall be reincarnated in the year 2003, in the year 2010, and then in the year 2014. He shall appear once more in the year 2081. And never again after that.

Alice Sheldon shall appeal to the masses in the year 2017. Alfonso Reyes shall be killed once and for all in the year 2058, but in fact it shall be Reyes who kills his killers. Marguerite Duras shall live in the nervous system of thousands of women in the year 2035.

And the little voice said, How strange, how strange, I haven't read some of those authors you mentioned.

Which ones? I asked.

Well, that Alice Sheldon, for example. I have no idea who she is.

I laughed. I laughed for quite a while. What's so funny, asked the little voice. Having caught you out, you being so cultured and all, I answered.

Cultured, I don't know if I'm cultured, whatever that means, but I have read a bit. How odd, I said, as if the dream had suddenly swung 180 degrees and I was now in some cold place, populated by multiple Popocatepetls and Ixtacihuatls. What's odd, asked the little voice. The fact that the angel of my dreams is from Buenos Aires when I'm Uruguyuan. Ah, well, that's quite common, actually, she said. Alice Sheldon publishes her books under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr., I said, shivering from the cold. I haven't read them, said the voice. She writes science fiction, stories and novels, I said. I haven't read them. I haven't read them, said the voice, and I could distinctly hear the sound of chattering teeth. Do you have teeth? I asked incredulously.

Not real, genuine teeth of my own, no, she replied. But when I'm with you, all your missing teeth chatter for me. My teeth! I thought with some affection but not a trace of nostalgia. This cold is unbearable, don't you think, said my guardian angel. Yes, it's very, very cold, I said. What do you say we get out of this ice-box, the voice proposed. That's a great idea, I said, but I don't know how we'll manage that. You'd have to be a mountain climber to get out of here without smashing your skull.

For a while we moved across the ice, trying to make out Mexico City in the distance.

This reminds me of a picture by Caspar David Friedrich, said the little voice. I knew you'd say that, I replied. What do you mean by that, she asked. Nothing, nothing.

And then, hours or months later, the little voice said, We're going to have to walk out of here, no one is going to come and rescue us. And I said to her, We can't, we'll smash our skulls (or I will). Anyway, I'm starting to get used to the cold and the purity of this air; it's as if we had gone back to live in Dr. Atl's most transparent region, with a vengeance. And the little voice looked at me with a sound as sad and crystalline as Rimbaud's poem about the vowels and said, You've become used to it.

And then, some months or maybe years of silence later, she said to me, You remember those compatriots of yours who had a plane accident? Which compatriots? I asked, tired of that voice interrupting my dreams of nothing. The ones who crashed in the Andes and everyone had given up hope and they were up in the mountains for something like three months, eating the dead bodies so as not to die of hunger, I think they were soccer players, said the little voice. They were rugby players, I said. Rugby players? That's funny, I thought they were soccer players. Anyway, so you remember them? Yes, I remember them, the rugby-playing cannibals of the Andes. Well, that's what you should do, said the little voice.

Who am I supposed to eat? I said, looking for her shadow, which sounded as sweet and emphatic as Ruben Darío's "Marcha Triunfal." Not me, you can't eat me, said the little voice. Who can I eat then? I'm alone here. There's you and me and the thousands of Popocatepetls and Ixtaccihuatls and the icy wind and nothing else, I said as I walked through the snow and scanned the horizon for any sign of Latin America 's biggest city. But Mexico fucking City was nowhere to be seen and what I really wanted to do was to go back to sleep.

Then the little voice began to talk about the end of a novel by Julio Cortázar, the one where a character is dreaming that he's in a movie theater and someone comes along and tells him to wake up. And she started talking about Marcel Schwob and Jerzy Andrzejewski and Pitol's translation of Andrzejewski's novel, and I said, Hold it, will you, I know all that already, my problem, if it really is a problem, isn't how to wake up but how to fall asleep again, which is pretty strange, since I have pleasant dreams and no one wants to wake up from a pleasant dream. To which the little voice replied in psychoanalytic jargon, which dispelled any doubts I might have had about her city of origin: definitely Buenos Aires, not Montevideo. Then I said to her, That's funny, my shivers are usually Uruguayan, but the guardian angel of my dreams is Argentinean. To which she replied, in a professorial tone, Indeed she is.

And then we remained silent, while the wind fitfully whipped up necklaces of ice that hung in the air for a few seconds before disappearing; both of us were scanning the featureless horizon so as not to miss the silhouette of Mexico City should it appear somewhere, although, to tell the truth, we held out little hope.

Finally the little voice said, Hey, Auxilio, I better get going. Where to, I asked her. To another dream, she said. Which dream, I asked. Any other dream, she said, I'm freezing to death here. And she said this with such heart-felt sincerity that I looked for her face in the snow and when at last I found her little face it sounded just like a poem by Robert Frost about the snow and the cold, and that made me very sad, because the little voice was not lying- it was true that she was freezing, poor thing.

So I took her in my arms to warm her up and said to her, You go whenever you like, that's absolutely fine. I would have liked to say something more, but those rather uninspired words were all I could muster. And the little voice moved in my arms like the fluff on a weightless angora sweater, and purred like the cats in Remedios Varo's garden. And when she had warmed up I told her, Go on, it's been a pleasure to meet you, go before you start to freeze again. The little voice slipped out of my arms (but it was as if she had come out of my navel) and off she went without saying Goodbye or Ciao or anything, she took French leave, like a good Argentinean guardian angel, and I was left alone, with my thoughts running wild, and the upshot of all that cogitation was, in the end, that the little voice had made me spout utter nonsense. You've made a fool of yourself, I said aloud, or at least I tried to say it aloud.

I say I tried because that was all I could do: open my mouth and attempt to form those words in the snowbound wilderness, but the cold was so intense that I couldn't even move my jaws. So I suppose I only thought what I was trying to say, although I should add that my thoughts were deafening (or so they seemed to me among those snowy heights), as if the cold, while numbing and killing me, were simultaneously turning me into a kind of yeti, a muscle-bound snow-woman, hirsute and stentorian, although of course I knew that this was all in my imagination, I hadn't acquired bulging muscles or long hair to protect me from the icy blasts or, least of all, a voice resonant as a cathedral, a self-sufficient voice with no function but to articulate a single, vacuous, hollow, insomniac's question-Why? Why?-until the walls of ice began to split and come crashing down with a huge din, while others reared up behind the screen of dust raised by the collapse, so that there was nothing to be done; it was inexorable, hopeless, futile, everything, even crying, because on the snowy heights, as I was astonished to learn, people do not cry, they only ask questions; on the heights of Machu Picchu no one cries, either because their tear ducts have frozen up or because at that altitude even tears are futile, which, however you look at it, is the limit.