I came to Chicago to work with Fe Verdejo five years after she put together her famous exhibition on black women freed from slavery in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latin America. Other well-known historians like Álvaro Márquez and Figurado Ortiz had already collaborated with her. There are few women like Fe in our discipline--educated in Florence and in Mexico, with fellowships at the Museum of Natural History or the Schomburg Institute in New York. There are hardly any academic stars with her pedigree and that are also black women like Fe. There are hundreds of thousands of historians like Ortiz or Márquez. We are men, bookworms, with extensive education, and as white as the scrolls we surround ourselves with to survive our inadequate belonging to the world of the living. I was hired to take over the digital archives for the Institute for Historical Research in the Department of Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago. My forte is the restoration and preservation of historical documents via their digitalization.

I am also an expert in designing websites, blogs, digital lectures, and entire web domains. I guess I'm what you might call a virtual researcher. I do the exact same task as the monastic scribe, but in the digital age. I reconstruct (and also illustrate) fragments of the past. I offer them to the present in hyper real time, a time that tries to mock death from the natural world, the stillness of paper, the slowness of facts. Yet, the effect is similar. I live like a monk suspended in time, paled by the glow of computer screens. I live shut away, absorbed in History's hushed intentions.

And of this I'm sure: Fe likes us exactly like that. Pale, distant men who, unlike an alpha male, keep their hunger tucked away. The cursed desire of a frustrated hunter and his curiosity.