I said: boys, this was what Manuel Maples Arce’s prose was like, hurtling and incendiary, full of words that got us hot and bothered, prose that might not mean anything to you now, but that in its day captivated generals of the Revolution, stalwart men who had seen death and who had killed and who when they read or heard Manuel’s words were stopped in their tracks, stopped cold, as if to say what the hell is this, prose that promised poetry like the sea, the sea in the skies of Mexico.
