Sunday morning Céline sat beside Professor Y brunching on Stevens' late coffee and oranges. Refuting incomprehension, he yelled –Mes trois points sont indispensables!... indispensables bordel Dieu!... –pounding an S into the counter of the diner–. Indispensables à mon métro!... In the figure of the ellipsis he laid the crossties of his subway system, beams of three points over which train cars haul their emotions closer to the page. He used three points when just two would be enough to draw a line, or even something more complex, like Cortázar's two...

tejiendo un dibujo, una figura, algo inexistente como vos y como yo, como los dos puntos perdidos en París que van de aquí para allá, de allá para aquí, haciendo su dibujo, danzando para nadie, ni siquiera para ellos mismos, una interminable figura sin sentido.

The three points are traditionally a rhetorical device of continuance, a triptych of spikes fastening the rail to the timber to keep the eyes going on to the next phrase despite it all, despite a spike in each hand and a third through the feet, encouraging persistence like today's semicolon tattoo movement. However, relentlessness can easily become its own foil. Suddenly everything becomes nothing, an aposiopetic ellipsis trailing us off into silence, an out-of-body experience like kind Fierro's kind words addressing my surname, erasing our final point like Girri's one...

abjurando de armas, faltas, / de oraciones donde borrar las faltas, / blando organismo, entidad / que ignora cómo decir: "Yo soy" / y en la enfermedad y la muerte, / vejez y nacimiento, / ya no encontrarán lugar, / como no lo encontraría el tigre / para meter su garra, / el rinoceronte el cuerno, / la espada su filo. // Antes hacía, ahora comprendo.

But while we are here busied, understanding ourselves by counting down, nearby Ida continues counting up: Octavio Paz, Alfonso Reyes, Reina Sofía... energetically stomping S's through the halls, adding footsteps to her serie de la constancia.