Few Spanish-language writers had such an intense and extensive epistolary discipline as Octavio Paz: thousands of letters to other writers, to his friends, to his editors and, of course, to the women he loved. In addition to his loyalty to the mailbox, Paz made the reading of letters part of his system of critical curiosity. For him, letters were a superior form of dialogue, a suitable seat for discord and concord, a shared diary and an intimate log of his own life.

And it also seemed to him that sometimes the letters graduate to the rank of true literary works.

This is the case of those in this book, the letters that Paz sent between 1935 and 1945 to whom he called "Helena", the writer Elena Garro, his first wife. The letters illuminate the first years of an intense passion that sailed from the fervor of the initial infatuation towards the reefs of time
and in the end shipwreck of heartbreak. In addition to being "an outline of our spirit, the passionate but clear confession of our heart" —as he writes to Helena—, these letters are also a guide to the intellectual formation of the young poet and a feverish record of social life. and politics of Mexico during those turbulent years.