POCHO'S PREDELICTION FOR FICTION EXPLAINED

Pocho, short for Luis Pablo, did not take advantage of libraries as a child. He grew up in a sparse exurb called Kendall in Miami where libraries were like outposts: spaced inexorably apart. So, Pocho either used the school library real quick before jumping on the bus, or during lunch if he really needed a book that bad. He read what he was assigned because books were what you lugged; they did not define you as much as what type of clothes your parents bought for you. However, Pocho had a strong penchant for reading Time even though he was just twelve. Pocho felt that the pages of Time and cockroaches would be the only things to survive an all out Nuclear Erasure.

Besides, if Pocho really wanted a book, he could pull one of the shelf of his Mom's bookshelf. The bookshelf held other media but it's "spine" was the books that Graciela had managed to lug out of Buenos Aires with her in 1972. They were books that could get you in serious trouble with the Ford Falcon police, or that could lead to massive arrests and detentions of people who most often than not were harmless and full of parla but no real chutzpah. The people the military government killed during the Dirty War more often than not were low-level subversives, possibly agitators, but nothing the illiterate slobs that comprised the police force couldn't handle. But Graciela's bookshelf was wicked. It had fiction by Unamuno, contemporary history by Galeano; Graciela had a copy of Sarmiento's Facundo Quiroga and of course every little short story collection ever put out by Cortazar.

In fact, if forced to trace Pocho's lineage, one could clearly see by family memorabilia that Pocho was in fact related to Julio Cortazar(Years ago, Pocho's Mom had put a pic of Julio Cortazar smoking a Galuoise in a frame and put that frame on a table with other pics of actual family members in Pocho's family). On his Father's side, Pocho's father had a cousin that was a hard-on academic and cultural attache to Indira Ghandi. She had done this in a po-dunk town in the province of Buenos Aires, at a time when the province of BA was where families had their little quinchitos. Julio Cortazar actually taught grammar school in that same po-dunk town; he probably wrote that letter to Borges while an inquilino of the peon-house of some moneyed family's quincho. But reading was an act that many people in Pocho's family did and Graciela's books were testament to that.