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To Enrique Fierro and Ida Vitale—   Just like you, muchachos, I didn’t believe in ghosts, and if I’d heard then one of the stories I tell Mario now, I would have said poor guy, and then I would have added, fully convinced, he’s crazy, or maybe, he’s pretending to be crazy or he’s lost it, or better yet, he’s loco, and the world, muchachos, listen up, this world is an endless black joke, but at least I – I don’t know about you – but I, officer Warren Sutpen, ex-nightwatchman of the glorious Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, here, at my forty-some years and ready to respond to the call, still find myself saved   Saved from who or what? I don’t really get it I don’t get it now, and I didn’t before And the thing is, before, say, a shitload of years ago, I didn’t talk like this For example, not six months ago, the word ‘joke’ meant something funny to me, like ‘just kidding’, or ‘playing a trick’, and ‘black’, I mean, ‘negro’, was just a little word I couldn’t use, no, never ever, not to talk about los pinches negros, for instance (Mario, my psychologist, calls them ‘African-Americans’, and if they’re Chinese, they’re ‘Asian-Americans’, and if they’re Latinos, he calls them ‘Hispanics’ and if they’re Hindus he calls them ‘Indians’, and so all this networking or whatever it is seems to go really well for him, since he says everything in this nice, musical way that I just can’t imitate whenever he corrects me with his perfect accent and the manners of the white Texan he actually isn’t)   He also says two marvellous things about ghosts The first: Warren – he looks at me, I listen – is that they seem very real, but really, they’re the product of delirium, of a mental anomaly that’s perfectly controllable if only you accept it, and of course, Mario, I accept it, and moreover, I’ve made that very clear to all the fucking ghosts The second is that talking with them shouldn’t be considered psychotic