the Fairy told him. —CARLO COLLODI, THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO Monsieur Jean-Luc Terradillos, L’Actualité Poitou-Charentes Poitiers, France 1st January 2003 My dear Curious Impertinent, I mistrust letters as a literary genre. They claim to tell an impartial truth independent of their scrumdolious author (my Cuban grandmother used this adjective to describe dresses which look swanky but are badly cut and sewn, and I bet myself that I would manage to use it in the first paragraph), when the opposite is true: only one chronicler gets to give his version of the story. But the epistolary genre is, in this case, the only one left to me. I’ve exhausted all my options: my literature no longer encompasses the epic genre, and the lyric one, such a conceited form, has always been denied to my muse. So I’ll have to be satisfied with this letter. At least no shit-stirring editor is going to stick his nose in it. I met Bevilacqua in prison, but you already know that.
