Last Evenings On Earth

DENTIST

He wasn't Rimbaud, he was just an Indian boy. I met him in 1986. That year, for reasons that are neither particularly germane to this story nor, it strikes me now, particularly interesting, I spent a few days in Irapuato, the Strawberry Capital, where I stayed with a dentist friend who was going through a rough patch. I thought I was the mess (my girlfriend had recently decided to put an end to our long-term relationship), but when I arrived in Irapuato, intending to take some time off, recover my peace of mind, and think about my future, I found my dentist friend, normally so discreet and composed, in a state bordering on desperation.

Ten minutes after I arrived he told me he had killed a patient. Since I didn't see how a dentist could possibly kill anyone, I begged him to calm down and tell me the whole story. The story was simple, in as much as a story of this sort can be, and from his rather disjointed telling of it I deduced that in no way could he be held responsible for anybody's death.

The story also struck me as strange. On top of his day job in a private dental clinic, which provided a more than comfortable living, my friend worked for a kind of medical cooperative for the poor and needy, categories that might appear to be synonymous, but for my friend, and above all for the ideologues who had established the charitable organization in question, there was, it seems, some kind of difference. Only two dentists had volunteered their services and there was a great deal to do. As the cooperative did not possess a dental surgery, the dentists saw patients at their respective clinics, outside business hours (as my friend put it), mainly at night, and were assisted by volunteers: dentistry students with a social conscience, keen to refine their skills.

The patient who had died was an old Indian woman who had turned up one night with an abscessed gum. The operation on the abscess had not been performed by my friend but by a student working at his clinic. The woman passed out and the student panicked. Another student called my friend. When he arrived at the clinic and tried to find out what was going on, he was confronted with a cancerous gum, clumsily incised, and soon realized there was nothing to be done. They sent the woman to the Irapuato General Hospital, where she died a week later.

Such cases were, he told me, quite rare, roughly one in a hundred thousand, and a dentist could reasonably expect never to encounter one in the whole course of his career. I said I understood, although in fact I didn't understand at all, and that night we went out drinking. As we proceeded from bar to bar (they were more or less middle-class bars) I kept thinking about the old Indian woman and the cancer gnawing at her gums.

My friend told me the story again, with a number of significant changes, which I attributed to the quantity of alcohol we had absorbed by that stage, after which we got into his Volkswagen and went to eat at a cheap restaurant on the outskirts of Irapuato. It was a striking change of scene. Before we had been rubbing shoulders with professional people, public servants, and businessmen, now we were surrounded by laborers, the unemployed, and beggars.

Meanwhile my friend's melancholy was becoming more pronounced. At midnight he began railing against Cavernas. The painter. A few years before, my friend had bought two of his engravings, which had pride of place on his living room wall. One day, at a party thrown by one of his colleagues, a dentist who lived in the Zona Rosa and, if I remember the story rightly, devoted his talents to repairing the smiles of Mexico's movie stars, my friend had tried to engage the prolific artist, who happened to be present, in conversation.

At first, Cavernas had been willing not only to converse but also to confide, revealing, without any prompting from my friend, certain intimate details of his life. At one point Cavernas proposed they share the favors of a young girl who, inexplicably, seemed to fancy the dentist rather than the painter. My friend made it clear that he didn't give a damn about the girl. He wasn't interested in a threesome; what he wanted was to buy another engraving, directly, without middle men; he didn't mind which one and the artist could name his price, as long as it was personally dedicated: "For Pancho, in memory of a wild night" or something along those lines.

From that point on, Cavernas's attitude changed. He started to look askance at me, my friend recalled. What the fuck do dentists know about art? he said. He asked if I was an out-and-out faggot or if it was just a phase I was going through. Naturally it took my friend a while to realize he was being insulted. Before he could react and explain that what he felt for Cavernas was simply the admiration of an art lover for the work of a misunderstood genius, one of the world's truly great painters, the genius had made himself scarce.

It was a while before my friend found him again. As he searched, he rehearsed in his head what he would say. Finally he spotted the painter on the balcony, with two guys who looked like gangsters. Cavernas saw him coming and said something to his companions. My friend the dentist smiled. Cavernas's companions smiled too. My friend was probably rather more drunk than he realized, or than he cared to remember. In any case the painter greeted him with an insult and the two heavies grabbed him by his arms and his waist and dangled him over the balcony. My friend passed out.

He vaguely remembered Cavernas calling him a faggot again, and the men laughing as they dangled him, cars parked in the sky, a grey sky like the Calle Sevilla. Knowing for certain that he was going to die, and for nothing, or for something completely stupid; knowing that his life, the life he was about to lose, had been one long series of stupidities— in other words, nothing. And there was not even any dignity in that certain knowledge.

He told me all this as we drank tequila in that cheap restaurant in one of the poor neighborhoods of Irapuato, which, needless to say, didn't have a liquor licence. Then he launched into an argument whose principal objective was to discredit art. Cavernas's engravings, I knew, were still hanging in my friend's living room and I had no reason to suspect that he had taken any steps to sell them. When I tried to point out that what had happened between him and Cavernas was an incident in his life story, not an episode in art history, so that it might be used to discredit certain persons, but not artists in general and certainly not art itself, my friend hit the roof.

But that's where art comes from, he said: life stories. Art history comes along only much later. That's what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It's the only thing that really is particular and personal. It's the expression of and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story.

With a gleam in his eye he stared at me for a moment. The death of the Indian woman from gum cancer had obviously affected him more than I had realized at first.

So now you're wondering what I mean by the secret story? asked my friend. Well, the secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie.

And what separates one track from the other? he asked me. I must have said something, although I can't remember what; in any case at that point my friend saw someone he knew, turned away from me, and started waving. I remember that the restaurant had been gradually filling up with people. I remember that there were green tiles on the walls, like a public urinal, and that the bar, deserted before, was now thronged with weary, jovial, or sinister-looking characters. I remember a blind man singing a song in the corner of the room or maybe the song was about a blind man. A cloud of smoke had accumulated over our heads. Then the object of my friend's attention approached our table.

He can't have been more than sixteen years old. He looked younger. He was rather short, and could have been strongly built but was filling out and losing definition. His clothes were cheap, but there was something vaguely incongruent about them, as if they were sending a garbled message from various places at once, and he was wearing a pair of worn-out tennis shoes, shoes that my friends and I, or rather the children of some of my friends, would long ago have laid to rest on a closet floor or dispatched to the garbage dump.

He sat down at our table and my friend told him to order whatever he liked. It was then that he smiled for the first time. It wasn't what you'd call a pleasant smile; on the contrary, it was wary and suspicious, the smile of someone who expects little from others and all of it bad. Then, as the boy sat down with us and exhibited his wintry smile, it occurred to me that perhaps my friend, a confirmed bachelor who could have chosen to live in Mexico City years ago but had preferred to stay in his hometown, Irapuato, had become, or had always been, a homosexual, and that for some obscure reason this fact, kept secret for years, had emerged in the course of our conversation that night about the Indian woman and her cancerous gum. But I soon discarded this idea and concentrated on the newcomer. Or perhaps what happened was that his eyes, which I hadn't noticed until then, compelled me to put aside my fears (since in those days, even the remote possibility that my friend might be a homosexual frightened me) and turn my full attention to the boy, who seemed to be suspended between adolescence and an appalling childhood.

His eyes were — I don't know how else to put it— forceful. That was the adjective that occurred to me at the time, and clearly it fell far short of capturing their palpable effect — the impact they made when you met his gaze, like an ache between the eyebrows — but I still can't come up with a better word. Though his body, as I said, was filling out toward the ampler forms of years to come, his eyes were all sharpness, sharpness in movement.

My friend introduced him with undisguised pleasure. His name was Josй Ramнrez. I held out my hand (I don't know why; I'm not normally so formal, at least not in bars, at night) and he hesitated for a moment. His handshake took me completely by surprise. His right hand, which I had expected to be smooth and indecisive, like a typical adolescent hand, was so covered in calluses it felt like iron. It was quite a small hand, and now that I think back to that night in the suburbs of Irapuato, the hand I see in my mind's eye is small, a small outstretched hand against a background of darkness and the bar's feeble gleams, a hand emerging from parts unknown, like the tentacle of a storm, but hard as iron, a hand forged by a blacksmith.

My friend was smiling. For the first time that day I saw a glimmer of happiness in his face, as if the physical presence of Josй Ramнrez (with his round face, sharp eyes, and hard hands) had dispelled both his guilt about the Indian woman with her cancerous mouth and the recurrent malaise caused by his memory of the painter Cavernas. As if in reply to a question that elementary good manners forbade me to ask, although I was tempted, my friend said that he had met Josй Ramнrez through his work.

It took me a moment to realize that he was referring to his dental practice. Free treatment, said the boy, with a voice that, like his eyes and hands, was at odds with the rest of his body. At the cooperative, said my friend. I did six fillings for him: a work of art. Josй Ramнrez nodded and lowered his eyes. It was as if he had reassumed his true identity, that of a sixteen-year-old boy. Later on, I remember, we ordered more drinks and Josй Ramнrez ate a serving of corn tortillas with chili (he didn't want anything more, although my friend kept saying, Order whatever you like, it's my treat).

For the rest of the time we spent in the restaurant, they talked to each other; I didn't join in. Now and then I caught a few words of their conversation; it was about art. My friend had gone back to his story about Cavernas, which for some reason he seemed to be mixing up with the story of the Indian woman dying in a hospital bed, in terrible pain, or perhaps not, perhaps she had been anaesthetized, perhaps someone had given her regular doses of morphine, anyway that was the image I had: the Indian woman, a little bundle abandoned in a hospital bed in Irapuato, Cavernas laughing, and his impeccably framed engravings hanging in the dentist's living room, a room that the young Josй Ramirez, so I gathered from what my friend was saying, had visited (along with the rest of the house no doubt) and in which he had seen, and appreciated, the engravings, the pride of the dentist's art collection.

Eventually we left that restaurant. My friend paid and led the march toward the exit. He wasn't as drunk as I thought and there was no need to suggest that he let me drive. I vaguely remember some other places, where we didn't stay very long, and finally an enormous vacant lot on a dirt road running out into the country, where Josй Ramнrez got out of the car and said good night without shaking hands.

I said it seemed funny to drop him off there, with no houses in sight, only darkness and the silhouette of a hill in the background, dimly lit by the moon. I said we should go with him part of the way. Without turning to look at me, my friend (his hands on the wheel, tired but calm) replied that we couldn't go with him, there was no need to worry, the kid knew the way perfectly well. Then he started the car again, switching on the high beams and, before the car started to reverse, I glimpsed an unreal landscape, in black-and-white, made up of stunted trees, weeds, a cart trail — a cross between a garbage dump and an idyllic picture postcard of the Mexican countryside.

The boy had disappeared without a trace.

Back at the dentist's house, I had trouble getting to sleep. In the guest room there was a painting by a local artist: an impressionistic landscape in which there seemed to be a city and a valley, rendered almost exclusively in a range of yellow tones. I believe there was something evil in that picture. I remember tossing and turning, exhausted but unable to sleep, while a feeble light from the window spread a rippling fire through the landscape. It was not a good picture. It wasn't the picture that was troubling me, stopping me from getting to sleep, filling me with a vague and irreparable sadness, although I was tempted to get up, take it down, and turn it to the wall. I was tempted to go back to Mexico City that night.

The next day I got up late and didn't see my friend until lunchtime. I was alone in the house with the woman who came every day to clean, so I thought it would be best to go out for a walk. Irapuato is not a beautiful city, but there is, undeniably, a charm to its streets and the calm central district, where the locals busy themselves conspicuously with what in Mexico City would be considered mere distractions. Since I had nothing to do, after breakfast in a cafй (orange juice) I sat down on a bench to read the newspaper, while high school students and public servants strolled past, exercising their talents for leisure and idle chat.

For the first time since I had set out for Irapuato, my troubled love life back in Mexico City seemed remote. There were even birds in the square where I was sitting. Later on I visited a bookshop (it took a while to find one), where I bought a book with illustrations by Emilio Carranza, a landscape painter born in El Hospital, a village or farming cooperative near Irapuato. I was planning to give it to my friend the dentist; I thought he would like it.

We were to meet at two in the afternoon. I went to his clinic. The secretary politely asked me to wait: at the last minute someone had turned up unannounced, but my friend would be free shortly. I sat down in the waiting room and started reading a magazine. I was alone in the room. The silence in my friend's clinic, indeed in the whole building, was almost absolute. For a moment I thought the secretary had lied to me: my friend wasn't there, something bad had happened and he had rushed off, leaving explicit instructions not to give me any cause for alarm. I stood up, and started to walk back and forth in the waiting room; naturally I felt ridiculous.

The secretary had left the reception desk. I felt like picking up the phone and making a call, but it was an absurd reflex, since I didn't know anyone to call in that city. I bitterly regretted having come to Irapuato, cursed my emotional susceptibility, swore that as soon as I got back to Mexico City I would find an intelligent, beautiful, and above all sensible woman, whom I would marry after a brief and drama-free engagement. I sat in the secretary's chair and tried to calm down. For a while I stared at the typewriter, the appointment book, a wooden container full of pencils, paperclips, and erasers, arranged in what seemed to be perfect order, which was incomprehensible to me, since no one in their right mind arranges paperclips (pencils and erasers, yes, but not paperclips), until I noticed my hands trembling over the typewriter keys, which made me stand up with a start and set off resolutely in search of my friend with my heart thumping in my chest.

Even in the grip of a sudden panic attack, manners can sometimes prevail. While opening doors and barging through the clinic, calling out to my friend, I was, I remember, trying to think of a way to explain my behavior when I found him, if I did. I still don't know what came over me that afternoon. It was probably the last outward manifestation of the anxiety or sadness I had brought with me from Mexico City and was to leave behind in Irapuato.

My friend, of course, was in his consulting room, and I found him with a patient, a distinguished-looking woman of about thirty, and his nurse, a short girl with mestizo features, whom I hadn't seen before. None of them seemed surprised by my sudden appearance. My friend smiled at me and said, I'll be finished in a minute.

Later, when I was trying to explain what I had felt in the waiting room (apprehension, anxiety, fear mounting uncontrollably), my friend declared that something similar often happened to him in buildings that seemed to be empty. Basically, I knew, he meant well. I tried to put it out of my mind. But once my friend got talking there was no stopping him, and during the meal, which lasted from three till six in the evening, he kept coming back to the subject of seemingly empty buildings, that is, buildings that you think are empty because you can't hear a sound, but in fact they aren't empty, and somehow you can tell, although your senses, your ears, your eyes, are telling you they are. So it's not that you feel anxious or afraid because you're in an empty building, or even because you might be trapped or locked inside an empty building, which is not beyond the realm of possibility, no, the reason you're anxious or afraid is that you know, deep down, that there is no such thing as an empty building, in every so-called empty building someone is hiding, keeping quiet, and that's the terrifying thing: the fact that you are not alone, said my dentist friend, even when everything indicates that you are.

And then he said: You know when you really are alone? In a crowd, I said, thinking I was following his train of thought, but no, it wasn't in a crowd. I should have been able to guess the answer: When you die. Death: the only real solitude there is in Mexico; the only solitude in Irapuato.

That night we got drunk. I gave him my present. He said he didn't know Carranzas work. We went out to dinner and got drunk.

We started in the bars of the central district and then we returned to the outskirts, where we had been the night before, where we had met young Josй Ramнrez. I remember that at one point in our erratic journey I had the impression that my friend was looking for Ramirez. I said so. He said I was mistaken. I told him he could speak freely to me, anything he said would remain between us. He said he always had spoken freely to me and after a while he looked me in the eye and added that he had nothing to hide. I believed him. But I still had the impression that he was looking for the boy. That night we didn't go to bed until around six in the morning. At one point the dentist started reminiscing about the old days, when we were both students at the UNAM and fervent, blind admirers of Elizondo. I was enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and he was studying dentistry. We met at a discussion organized by the university's film society, after the screening of a movie by a Bolivian director, who I guess must have been Sanjinйs.

During the discussion my friend got up, and I don't know if he was the only one, but he was certainly the first to say he didn't like the film, and why. I didn't like it either, but at the time I would never have admitted it. We became friends immediately. That night I discovered that he shared my admiration for Elizondo, and during the second summer of our friendship, we attempted to emulate the characters in Narda or Summer by renting a shack by the sea in Mazatlбn, not exactly the Italian coast, but, with a little imagination and good will, close enough.

Then we grew up and, looking back, our youthful adventures seemed rather contemptible. Young middle-class Mexicans are condemned to imitate Salvador Elizondo, who in turn imitated the inimitable Klossowski, or fatten slowly in business or bureaucratic suits, or flail around ineffectually in vaguely leftist, vaguely charitable organizations. Between them, Elizondo (whom I had stopped rereading) and the painter Cavernas just about sated our insatiable appetite for Culture, and each mouthful left us poorer, thinner, uglier, and more ridiculous than before. My friend went back to Irapuato and I stayed on in Mexico City and we both, in different ways, tried to distract ourselves from the gradual devastation of our lives, the ethics and aesthetics we'd professed, the Mexican nation and our damned useless dreams.

But we still had friendship and that was the main thing. And there we were, passably drunk by this stage, reminiscing about our youth, when suddenly my friend referred to the old Indian woman who had died of gum cancer and our conversation about art history and the particular; he mentioned the "two tracks" (though I could barely remember what they were supposed to represent), and finally he started talking about the restaurant where we had met Josй Ramнrez, which was where he had been heading all along, and he asked me what I thought of him, although from the way he put it I couldn't really tell if he was referring to the Indian boy or to himself, so to play it safe, I said, Nothing much, or maybe I shrugged in a noncommittal way. My friend immediately asked me if I thought, if the thought had crossed my mind, that there might be something between him and Josй Ramнrez (one of those awful, typically Mexican roundabout questions), and I said, No, of course not, man. How could you think that? Come on, don't worry. Perhaps I'm exaggerating or my memory is playing tricks, but perhaps not — the real chasm may have opened at that moment, the chasm I had sensed in the seemingly empty building, the one I had glimpsed as the Indian boy walked over to us for the first time, just as my friend, as it happened, was talking or ranting about the Indian woman and her corpse that seemed to keep shrinking, and then, perhaps because I was drunk, it all swirled together in my mind: the memories of our youth, the books we read, Narda or Summer by Eli-zondo, a living national treasure, our aspiring, make-believe summer in Mazatlбn, my girlfriend, who had decided out of the blue to make a new start, guided by her own sweet will, the years, Cavernas, my friend's art collection, the trip to Ira-puato, its calm streets, my friend's mysterious decision to settle down and work there, in his home town, when the normal thing to do would have been-And then he said: You have to get to know Josй. He stressed the verb know. You have to get to know him. And: I'm not. I'm not that way. you know. inclined. And then he talked about the dead Indian woman and the work of the cooperative. And he said: I'm not. you didn't think I was, did you? Of course not, I said. And then we went to a different bar and on the way there he said: Tomorrow. And I knew it wasn't the alcohol talking; tomorrow he would remember because a promise is a promise, isn't it? Of course it is. Then, trying to change the subject, I started talking about something that had happened to me when I was a child: I got stuck in the elevator of the building where we lived. Then I really was alone, I said. And my friend listened to me with a smile, as if he were thinking, What a jerk you've become, all those years in Mexico City, the stacks of books you've read and studied and taught, wherever it is you teach. But I went on: I was alone. For a long time. Sometimes (not often, to be perfectly honest) I still feel what I felt in that elevator. And do you know why I felt like that? My friend shrugged as if to say he couldn't care less. But I told him anyway: Because I was a child. I remember his reaction. He turned away from me, trying to see where he had parked the car. Bullshit, he said. Tomorrow you're going to see the real thing.

And the next day he hadn't forgotten. On the contrary, he remembered more than I did. He talked about Josй Ramнrez as if he were the boy's guardian. That night, I remember, we dressed as if we were going out to a singles bar or a brothel; my friend wore a brown corduroy jacket and I wore a leather jacket I had brought in case we went for a day trip into the country.

We began our tour with a couple of whiskies in a dim place near the center that smelled of aftershave. Then we went straight to the neighborhood where Josй Ramнrez hung out. We visited a pair of run-down cafйs, a restaurant (where we tried to eat although neither of us was hungry), and a bar called El Cнelo. Not a trace of the Indian boy.

When it was starting to look as if we had wasted the night, a curious night in the course of which we had hardly exchanged a word, we saw him, or thought we did, walking down a dimly lit sidewalk. My friend honked the horn and executed a reckless U-turn. Ramirez was waiting for us quietly on a corner. I rolled down the window and said hello. My friend leaned over in front of me and invited him to get in. The boy climbed into the car without a word. I remember the rest of the night as festive. Irrationally festive. It was as if we were celebrating the birthday of the young man in the backseat. As if we were his parents. As if we were his pimps. Or his minders: two sad white Mexicans protecting an enigmatic Indian compatriot. We laughed. We drank and laughed and everyone left us alone, sensing that to make fun of us would have been to risk life and limb.

We heard the story of Josй Ramнrez, or fragments of it; my friend thought it was wonderful, and, after a moment of puzzlement, so did I, though later, as we approached the unknown slopes of the night, to quote Poe, the story began to blur, as if the Indian boy's words could find nowhere to settle in our memories, which must be why I can hardly remember a thing he said. I do remember him telling us that he had attended a poetry workshop, a free poetry workshop, the literary version of the dental cooperative, although he didn't write a single poem, and at this my friend burst out laughing, but I didn't understand; I couldn't see what was so funny, until they explained that Ramirez wrote fiction. Stories, not poems. Then I asked why he hadn't signed up for a fiction workshop. And my dentist friend said, Because there aren't any fiction workshops. Don't you see? In this shit hole of a town the only thing they teach for free is poetry. Don't you see?

And then Ramirez started talking about his family, or maybe it was the dentist who told me about his family, but in any case there was nothing to say. Don't you see? Nothing. And I didn't really see, so just for something to say, I started talking about empty buildings and deception, but my friend silenced me with a gesture. There was nothing to say about them. Farmers. Dirt poor. Nothing to suggest that there was a genius in the family. Don't you see? I nodded compliantly, but in fact I didn't see at all. And then my friend declared that there were very few writers alive on a par with the boy sitting there before us. I swear to God: Very few. At which point he launched into an explication of Ramirez's work that chilled me.

Better than any of them, he said. Mexico's famous writers were like babes in arms compared to this rather fat, inexpressive adolescent with his hands hardened by work in the fields. What fields? I asked. The fields all around us, said the dentist, moving his hand in a circular gesture, as if Irapuato were an outpost in the wilderness, a fort in the middle of Apache territory. I took a fearful, sidelong glance at the boy and saw that he was smiling. Then my friend began to tell me about one of Ramirez's stories, a story about a child who had to look after his numerous younger brothers and sisters, that was the gist of it, the first part anyway, because then the plot swung around and smashed itself to pieces, and it became a story about the ghost of a schoolmaster trapped in a bottle, and about individual freedom, and new characters appeared: a pair of shady faith healers, a twenty-year-old girl on drugs, a guy reading a book by de Sade and living in a wrecked car beside the highway. All this in one story, said my friend.

And although the good-mannered thing to say would have been: Mmm, sounds interesting, I said I couldn't really express an opinion without reading it for myself. That's how I let myself in for it, when good manners could have saved me. My friend stood up and said to Ramirez, Let's go and get the stories. I remember Ramirez looked up at him, then across at me, and finally stood up without a word. I could have protested. I could have said it wasn't necessary. But by then I was already chilled through and nothing mattered to me anymore, although from somewhere deep inside I was watching our movements, which seemed to be orchestrated with an almost supernatural precision, and although I knew that those movements were not leading us toward any physical risk, I was also aware that in another sense we were venturing into dangerous territory, from which we would not be allowed to return without having paid a toll of pain or estrangement, a toll that we would eventually come to regret.

But I said nothing. We left the bar, got into my friend's car, and proceeded to lose our way among the streets on the edge of Irapuato, where the only other vehicles were police cars and the odd bus, streets that young Ramirez walked, so my friend told me as he drove on in a state of rapture, every night or every morning, returning from his forays into the city. I chose not to make any further comment and looked out at the feebly lit streets and the shadow of the car, intermittently projected onto the high walls of factories or abandoned warehouses, vestiges of a former time, already consigned to oblivion, when attempts had been made to industrialize the city. Then we emerged into a kind of suburb attached to that jumble of obsolete buildings. The street narrowed. There were no streetlights. I heard dogs barking. Like something from The Children of Sбnchez, isn't it, said the dentist. I didn't reply. Behind me I heard Ramirez's voice saying to turn right, then keep going straight ahead.

The headlights swept across a dirt road and lit up two wretched shacks behind a fence made of wood and wire, and then we emerged suddenly into what seemed to be open country, although it could equally have been a garbage dump. From there we continued on foot, Indian file, Ramirez leading the way, followed by the dentist and me. In the distance I could see headlights gliding along a highway: another world, and yet I felt those distant moving lights were somehow— horribly — emblematic of our destiny. I saw the silhouette of a hill. I sensed a movement in the darkness, among the bushes, and immediately thought: Rats, although it could just as well have been birds. Then the moon came out and I saw little houses scattered over the lower slopes of the hill and, farther off, a dark, plowed field, stretching away to a bend in the highway where a wood jutted up like a construction. Suddenly I heard the boys voice saying something to my friend and we stopped. His house had appeared from nowhere; the walls were yellow and white, and it had a low roof, like all the other sad-looking houses holding out against the night on the outskirts of Irapuato.

For a moment the three of us stood there in silence, spellbound, contemplating the moon or looking sadly at the boy's cramped dwelling or trying to make sense of the objects piled up in the yard: the only thing I could identify with any certainty was a crate. Then we went into a room with a low ceiling that smelled of smoke and Ramirez switched on a light. I saw a table, farm tools leaning against the wall, and a child asleep in an armchair.

The dentist looked at me. His eyes were gleaming with excitement. But I felt we should have been ashamed of what we were doing: rounding off a night on the town with a bit of schadenfreude. Except that we would be contemplating our own misfortune as well, I thought. Ramirez brought over two wooden chairs before disappearing through a doorway that seemed to have been hacked out with an axe. I soon realized that the room in which we were standing was a new addition to the house. We sat down and waited. When Ramirez reappeared he was carrying a stack of papers more than two inches thick. With a look of concentration he sat down and handed it to us. Read whatever you like, he whispered. I looked at my friend. He had already taken a story from the pile and was carefully arranging the pages. I said I thought the best thing to do would be to borrow the stories, take them back to my friend's house, and read them at our leisure. Or maybe I didn't actually say that, probably not. But thinking about it now, I can't imagine the scene any other way: me saying, Let's take them back and read them later, we'll be more receptive, and the dentist looking at me with something hard in his gaze, like a man condemned to death, ordering me, Just pick a story at random and read it, for Christ's sake.

So I did. I lowered my eyes, ashamed, chose a story and began to read. The story was four pages long; maybe that's why I chose it, because it was short, but when I got to the end, I felt as if I had read a novel. I looked at Ramirez. He was sitting in front of us, nodding off. My friend followed my gaze and told me in a whisper that the young writer got up very early in the morning. I nodded and chose another story. When I looked at Ramirez again he was slumped forward, sleeping with his head on his arms. Earlier, I had been almost falling asleep myself, but now I felt wide awake and absolutely sober. My friend passed me another story. Read this one, he whispered. I put it aside and finished the one I was reading before starting it.

As I was coming to the end of the third story, the other door opened and a man appeared who must have been about our age, but seemed much older. He smiled at us before walking quietly out into the yard. Josй's father, said my friend. Outside I heard tin cans knocking, quickening steps, and the sound of someone urinating onto the ground. In a different situation, this would have been enough to put me on my guard; I would have been straining to interpret those noises, preparing to avert a potential danger, but instead I went on reading.

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

But, to put it in plain terms and make myself clear, at a certain point I decided that I had read enough. My friend had stopped a while before. He was visibly tired. I suggested we leave. Before standing up, both of us looked at Ramirez, who was sleeping peacefully. When we went outside, day was dawning. There was no one in the yard and the fields all around seemed barren. I wondered where the father had gone. My friend pointed to his car and remarked how strange it was that the car didn't seem strange in those surroundings. Some surroundings! he added, no longer whispering. His voice sounded odd to me: hoarse, as if he had spent the night shouting. Let's go and have some breakfast, he said. I nodded. He said, We can talk about what's happened to us.

But as we left that godforsaken place I realized there was very little we could say about the events of the previous night. Both of us felt happy, but we knew, without a shadow of doubt, and without having to put it into words, that we would not be able to ascertain or reflect on the nature of what we had experienced.

When we got back to the house I poured us out a whiskey each, as a nightcap, and my friend lapsed into silent contemplation of the engravings by Cavernas hanging on the wall. I put his glass on the table and stretched out in an armchair without saying a word. The dentist scrutinized his engravings, first with his hands on his hips, then resting his chin on one hand and finally ruffling his hair. I laughed. So did he. For a moment I thought he was going to take one of the pictures down and proceed to destroy it methodically. But instead he sat down next to me and drank his whiskey. Then we turned in.

We didn't get much sleep. About five hours. I dreamed of young Ramirez's house. I saw it standing in the middle of Mexico's wastelands, plains, and garbage dumps, exactly as it was, bare of all ornamentation. Just as I had seen it, a few hours before, at the end of that supremely literary night. And for barely a second I understood the mystery of art and its secret nature. But then somehow the corpse of the old Indian woman who had died of gum cancer came into the dream, and that's the last thing I can remember. I think her wake was being held in Ramirez's house.

When I woke up I told the dentist about my dream, or what I could remember of it. You're not looking too good, he said. He wasn't looking too good himself, although I chose not to point this out. I soon realized that he needed some time on his own. When I announced that I was going for a walk around the city, I saw a look of relief on his face. That afternoon I went to the movies and fell asleep halfway through the film. I dreamed that we were committing suicide or forcing others to commit suicide. When I got back to my friend's house, he was waiting for me. We went out to dinner and tried to talk about what had happened the night before. It was useless. We ended up talking about some friends from Mexico City, people we had thought we knew but who had in fact turned out to be perfect strangers. Surprisingly, it was a pleasant evening.

The next day, Saturday, I went with him to his clinic, where he had a couple of hours' work to do for the cooperative. Community service, he said in a resigned sort of way as we got into his car. I was thinking of returning to Mexico City on Sunday and my conscience was telling me I should spend as much time as possible with my friend because I didn't know how long it would be before I would see him again.

For a long time (I couldn't even hazard a guess at how long now) we waited for a patient to turn up, my friend the dentist, a dentistry student, and I, but no one came.