Dear Louis,

Forgive the informality, but your last letter has been on my desk for a week and I find myself addressing you in my thoughts as a colleague rather than a correspondent. "The city demolishes itself every twenty years"—this is the most concise description of São Paulo I have ever read. You have put your finger on the wound.

I am attaching a photograph of the old Mercado Central, demolished last month to make way for a department store. The ironwork was Belgian, 1887. Gone in a single Sunday. No one protested. This is the illness I have been studying for ten years: a city that believes its future requires the erasure of its past.

Your letters are becoming a kind of therapy for me. Do not stop writing.

With affection,
Miriam