In Bogota this morning, on a narrow, one way street downtown a taxi stopped to let a person out. The impatient traffic piled on behind and plied the horn. The driver counted his money and while putting the whole wad back into his shirt pocket, rolled his head and looked into the rear view mirror. On his features was a surly look, a truculent. He put his car in gear and then accelerated deliberately lethargically away.

In Bogota this morning a librarian of long tenure took an English test. The test was to spring her from elementary level English. With eight other students she listened to the listening part five or six times. Unlike them, she took four hours to think about the whole test: they just took two. “Ay teecher,” she said, and shook her head.

In Bogota this afternoon at an awkward, crowded crosswalk a shouting whistling waiter bore across the street a tray with lunch: styrofoam containers stacked on each other and covering the tray. “I’ll burn you! Watch out!” he said, and all but “I’m really clumsy! Beware of retards bearing soup!” The crowds parted before him grudgingly or not at all—as if they were cars and he an ambulance with sirens, lights and all.

In Bogota today the city shuffled about its business starting early, around five or so and swelling to fill the consecutive buses running back and forth and up and down. All of it a collection of individual instances: real, pathetic, interesting, banal. Things you would never know if I hadn’t told you. I read Borges on the way to work: Labyrinthine Borges, with his mad imagination of endless, pedantic details, his deft, incisive, thorough erudition. In his mind was a great deal of the tangled patterns of our human life.