 I don't do this work, is that it? No, no. I apologize. I apologize. Let me do a quick commercial before we jump back into our reading. This evening, you enjoyed the excerpt from Huckleberry Finn very much. I can tell they have stunning re-hearing. Jack and Barbara, who's not in the room right now. Jack Clearman and Barbara are working on a program. Our producing program will happen in this room on October 16th. It's Twain by the Tail, reading from Mark Twain. So the entire evening will be readings from works of Mark Twain by different members of the community. And it will be in this room on the 16th from 6.30 to 8.00. So if you've enjoyed this sort of literary evening, please join us on the 16th of October. All right, now, without benefit of a microphone, we're very honored this evening that we have such a wonderful, diverse roster of readers. And we're extremely honored that we have the president of Montana State University with us this evening, Dr. Wadev Krizzato, who's going to read to us from the House of the Spirits, right this about Andy. With Twain, or with which I have had a very troublesome relationship. La Casa de los Espíritos, House of Spirits is one of those books that belong to magical realism. A very interesting Latin America genre that conflates the possible with the improbable, all in one's kind of work. At the beginning when I first read this book, I despised it. I did not like the work, particularly the first half of it. Because it looks like, and it reads like an imitation of that big master, which is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who then went on to win a Nobel Prize for 100 years of solitude. Senators of solitude. But the book is more than that. Certainly the first half, it's about magical realism. The story of a family in Latin America. But then, the second half, it takes off. And it becomes something else. And it's a political documentary. And it's the story about Salvador Andy, the first Marxist president to be elected in the Latin America. So, I'll read you several passages. And you see the difference. And you see the change. It opens in true, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talking about powerful women of extraordinary talents. It opens, the girl's strange beauty had a disturbing quality that even she could not help noticing. For this child of hers seems to have been made of a different material from the rest of the human race. Even before she was born, Nivia had known she was none of this world because she had already seen her increase. This was why she had not been surprised when the midwife screamed as the child emerged. At birth, Rosa was white and smooth, without a wrinkle, like a porcelain doll, with green hair and yellow eyes, the most beautiful creature to be born on earth since the days of original sin, as the midwife put it, making the sign of the cross. Her sister, Clara, is also a very strange girl, which had a different set of talents. Clara's strangeness was simply an attribute of their youngest daughter, like Luis Lim or Rosa's beauty. The child's mental powers bothered no one and produced no great disorder. They almost always surfaced in matters of minor importance and within the strict confines of their own. It was true there had been times just as they were about to sit down to dinner, and everyone was in the large dining room seated according to dignity and position. When the salt cellar would suddenly begin to shake and move among the plates and goblets without any visible source of energy or sign of an illusionist strike, Nivia would pull Clara's braids and that would be enough to wake her daughter from her mad destruction and return the salt cellar to him. This was not why the book was painted. In my wild dreams, I wanted for it to be prohibitive because I thought that he was imitating another. Ah, right? It was because of the sexual depictions, but also because of the political wandered. So Clara and Rosa belong to the same family of a very conservative senator. And after Allende is elected, then something happens. The idea of eliminating the new president, however, was not yet on anybody's mind. For his enemies were sure they would put an end to him through the same legal channels that had carried him to triumph. There he met with other politicians, a group of military men and gringos sent by their intelligence service to map a strategy for bringing down the new government, economic destabilization, as they call their Salatash. The plans are successful and the night of the victory the senator celebrates. In the big house on the corner, Senator Tueva opened up a bottle of friend champagne to celebrate the overthrow of the regime that he had fought against so ferociously, never suspecting that at that very moment his son, Highness Testicles, were being burned with an important seal, a different type of magical realism. When the curfew was lifted for a few hours to enable people to go out and buy food, Banco was amazed to see the stores filled with the products that during the preceding three years had been so scarce and that now appeared in the shop windows. The newspaper said that the beggars in the street, a sign that had not been seen in years, had been sent by international communism to discredit the military junta and undermine the return to order and progress. Cement walls were elected to hide the most unsightly shanty towns from the eyes of tourists and others who preferred not to see them. In a single night, as if by magic, beautifully pruned gardens and flowerbeds appeared on the avenues they had been planted by the unemployed to create the illusion of peaceful spring. White paint was used to erase the murals of doves and to remove all political posters from the site. Any attempt to write political messages in public was punished with a burst of machine gun fire on the spine. The clean, orderly silent streets were reopened to commerce. Soon the beggar children disappeared and all were noticed that the stray dogs and piles of garbage were gone too. The black market came to an end at the very moment when the presidential palace was won because speculators were threatened with martial law and execution by the fighting squad. Islands whose very name was unheard of began to be sold in stores along the things that only the rich had previously been able to buy as contraband. The city had never looked more beautiful. The upper-middle class had never been so happy. They could buy as much whiskey as they wanted and automobiles. And the book finishes with one of those powerful women summarizing this one. At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words but I know it was not kind. It was another woman who kept her notebook so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief. Passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events and cannot gauge the consequences of our acts. And we believe in the fiction of past, present and future but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. And if you don't believe me, I would like to leave that same span, that same message. At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have written these very words but I understand that I am not. It was another woman who kept her notebook so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is very brief. Passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events and cannot gauge the consequences of our acts. We believe in the fiction of time, in the present, the past and the future but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.