Perhaps I may be permitted to make a confession here, a very small confession. For many years, in books now happly forgotton, I tried to copy down the flavor, the essence of the outlying quarters of Buenos Aires. Of course, I abounded in local words; I did not omit such words as cuchilleros, milonga, tapia and others, and thus I wrote those forgettable and forgotten books. Then about a year ago, I wrote a story called “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”), which is a kind of nightmare, a nightmare in which there are elements of Buenos Aires, deformed by the horror of the
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