6
Horacio Guerra, professor of literature and official historian of Santa Teresa, distinguished polymath according to some friends from Mexico City, where he went every four months to soak up ideas, was, like Amalfitano, fifty years old, though unlike the latter he was beginning to enjoy a certain reputation-earned, God only knew, by the sweat of his own brow.
Born of humble stock, he had worked stubbornly his whole life to get ahead. He was awarded a scholarship by the government of Sonora, and finished his university studies at twenty-eight; he wasn’t a great student, but he was curious and, in his own way, diligent. At twenty-one he published a book of sonnets and cataphoras (Spell of the Dawn, Tijuana, 1964) that won him the respect of some influential reviewers at northern Mexico newspapers and inclusion, six years later, in an anthology of young Mexican poets edited by a young lady from Monterrey which managed to briefly engage Octavio Paz and Efraín Huerta in a dialectical battle (both despised the anthology, though for reasons that were contradictory and mutually opposed).