The Savage Detectives

I
MEXICANS LOST IN MEXICO

NOVEMBER 2

I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

NOVEMBER 3

I'm not really sure what visceral realism is. I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I'm in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I'm an orphan, and someday I'll be a lawyer. That's what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Or anyway for a long time. Then, as if it were settled, I started class in the law school's hallowed halls, but a month later I registered for Julio César Álamo's poetry workshop in the literature department, and that was how I met the visceral realists, or viscerealists or even vicerealists, as they sometimes like to call themselves. Up until then, I had attended the workshop four times and nothing ever happened, though only in a manner of speaking, of course, since naturally something always happened: we read poems, and Álamo praised them or tore them to pieces, depending on his mood; one person would read, Álamo would critique, another person would read, Álamo would critique, somebody else would read, Álamo would critique. Sometimes Álamo would get bored and ask us (those of us who weren't reading just then) to critique too, and then we would critique and Álamo would read the paper.

It was the ideal method for ensuring that no one was friends with anyone, or else that our friendships were unhealthy and based on resentment.

And I can't say that Álamo was much of a critic either, even though he talked a lot about criticism. Really I think he just talked for the sake of talking. He knew what periphrasis was. Not very well, but he knew. But he didn't know what pentapody was (a line of five feet in classical meter, as everybody knows), and he didn't know what a nicharchean was either (a line something like the phalaecean), or what a tetrastich was (a four-line stanza). How do I know he didn't know? Because on the first day of the workshop, I made the mistake of asking. I have no idea what I was thinking. The only Mexican poet who knows things like that by heart is Octavio Paz (our great enemy), the others are clueless, or at least that was what Ulises Lima told me minutes after I joined the visceral realists and they embraced me as one of their own. Asking Álamo these questions was, as I soon learned, a sign of my tactlessness. At first I thought he was smiling in admiration. Later I realized it was actually contempt. Mexican poets (poets in general, I guess) hate to have their ignorance brought to light. But I didn't back down, and after he had ripped apart a few of my poems at the second session, I asked him whether he knew what a rispetto was. Álamo thought that I was demanding respect for my poems, and he went off on a tirade about objective criticism (for a change), a minefield that every young poet must cross, etc., but I cut him off, and after explaining that never in my short life had I demanded respect for my humble creations, I put the question to him again, this time enunciating as clearly as possible.

"Don't give me this crap," said Álamo.

"A rispetto, professor, is a kind of lyrical verse, romantic to be precise, similar to the strambotto, with six or eight hendecasyllabic lines, the first four in the form of a serventesio and the following composed in rhyming couplets. For example…" And I was about to give him an example or two when Álamo jumped up and cut me off. What happened next is hazy (although I have a good memory): I remember Álamo laughing along with the four or five other members of the workshop. I think they may have been making fun of me.

Anyone else would have left and never gone back, but despite my unhappy memories (or my unhappy failure to remember what had happened, at least as unfortunate as remembering would have been), the next week there I was, punctual as always.

I think destiny brought me back. This was the fifth session of Álamo's workshop that I'd attended (but it might just as well have been the eighth or the ninth, since lately I've been noticing that time can expand or contract at will), and tension, the alternating current of tragedy, was palpable in the air, although no one could explain why. To begin with, we were all there, all seven apprentice poets who'd originally signed up for the workshop. This hadn't happened at any other session. And we were nervous. Even Álamo wasn't his usual calm self. For a minute I thought something might have happened at the university, that maybe there'd been a campus shooting I hadn't heard about, or a surprise strike, or that the dean had been assassinated, or they'd kidnapped one of the philosophy professors. But nothing like that was true, and there was no reason to be nervous. No objective reason, anyway. But poetry (real poetry) is like that: you can sense it, you can feel it in the air, the way they say certain highly attuned animals (snakes, worms, rats, and some birds) can detect an earthquake. What happened next was a blur, but at the risk of sounding corny, I'd say there was something miraculous about it. Two visceral realist poets walked in and Álamo reluctantly introduced them, although he only knew one of them personally; the other one he knew by reputation, or maybe he just knew his name or had heard someone mention him, but he introduced us to him anyway.

I'm not sure why they were there. It was clearly a hostile visit, hostile but somehow propagandistic and proselytizing too. At first the visceral realists kept to themselves, and Álamo tried to look diplomatic and slightly ironic while he waited to see what would happen. Then he started to relax, encouraged by the strangers' shyness, and after half an hour the workshop was back to normal. That's when the battle began. The visceral realists questioned Álamo's critical system and he responded by calling them cut-rate surrealists and fake Marxists. Five members of the workshop backed him up; in other words, everyone but me and a skinny kid who always carried around a book by Lewis Carroll and never spoke. This surprised me, to be honest, because the students supporting Álamo so fiercely were the same ones he'd been so hard on as a critic, and now they were revealing themselves to be his biggest supporters. That's when I decided to put in my two cents, and I accused Álamo of having no idea what a rispetto was; nobly, the visceral realists admitted that they didn't know either but my observation struck them as pertinent, and they said so; one of them asked how old I was, and I said I was seventeen and tried all over again to explain what a rispetto was; Álamo was red with rage; the members of the workshop said I was being pedantic (one of them called me an academicist); the visceral realists defended me; suddenly unstoppable, I asked Álamo and the workshop in general whether they at least remembered what a nicharchean or a tetrastich was. And no one could answer.

Contrary to my expectations, the argument didn't lead to an all-around ass-kicking. I have to admit I would have loved that. And although one of the members of the workshop did promise Ulises Lima that someday he would kick his ass, in the end nothing actually happened; nothing violent, I mean, although I responded to the threat (which, I repeat, was not directed at me) by letting the threatener know that he could have it out with me anywhere on campus, any day, any time.

The end of class was surprising. Álamo dared Ulises Lima to read one of his poems. Lima didn't need to be asked twice. He pulled some smudged, crumpled sheets from his jacket pocket. Oh no, I thought, the idiot is walking right into their trap. I think I shut my eyes out of sheer sympathetic embarrassment. There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter. But as I was saying, I closed my eyes, and I heard Lima clear his throat, then I heard the somewhat uncomfortable silence (if it's possible to hear such a thing, which I doubt) that settled around him, and finally I heard his voice, reading the best poem I'd ever heard. Then Arturo Belano got up and said that they were looking for poets who would like to contribute to the magazine that the visceral realists were putting out. Everybody wished they could volunteer, but after the fight they felt sheepish and no one said a thing. When the workshop ended (later than usual), I went with Lima and Belano to the bus stop. It was too late. There were no more buses, so we decided to take a pesero together to Reforma, and from there we walked to a bar on Calle Bucareli, where we sat until very late, talking about poetry.

I still don't really get it. In one sense, the name of the group is a joke. At the same time, it's completely in earnest. Many years ago there was a Mexican avant-garde group called the visceral realists, I think, but I don't know whether they were writers or painters or journalists or revolutionaries. They were active in the twenties or maybe the thirties, I'm not quite sure about that either. I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me). According to Arturo Belano, the visceral realists vanished in the Sonora desert. Then Belano and Lima mentioned somebody called Cesárea Tinajero or Tinaja, I can't remember which (I think it was when I was shouting to the waiter to bring us some beers), and they talked about the Comte de Lautréamont's Poems, something in the Poems that had to do with this Tinajero woman, and then Lima made a mysterious claim. According to him, the present-day visceral realists walked backward. What do you mean, backward? I asked.

"Backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown."

I said I thought this sounded like the perfect way to walk. The truth was I had no idea what he was talking about. If you stop and think about it, it's no way to walk at all.

Other poets showed up later on. Some were visceral realists, others weren't. It was total pandemonium. At first I worried that Belano and Lima were so busy talking to every freak who came up to our table that they'd forgotten all about me, but as day began to dawn, they asked me to join the gang. They didn't say "group" or "movement," they said "gang." I liked that. I said yes, of course. It was all very simple. Belano shook my hand and told me that I was one of them now, and then we sang a ranchera. That was all. The song was about the lost towns of the north and a woman's eyes. Before I went outside to throw up, I asked them whether the eyes were Cesárea Tinajero's. Belano and Lima looked at me and said that I was clearly a visceral realist already and that together we would change Latin American poetry. At six in the morning I took another pesero, this time by myself, which brought me to Colonia Lindavista, where I live. Today I didn't go to class. I spent the whole day in my room writing poems.

NOVEMBER 4

I went back to the bar on Bucareli, but the visceral realists never showed up. While I was waiting for them, I spent my time reading and writing. The regulars, a group of silent, pretty grisly-looking drunks, never once took their eyes off me.

Results of five hours of waiting: four beers, four tequilas, a plate of tortilla sopes that I didn't finish (they were half spoiled), a cover-to-cover reading of Álamo's latest book of poems (which I only brought so I could make fun of Álamo with my new friends), seven texts written in the style of Ulises Lima, or rather, in the style of the one poem I'd read, or really just heard. The first one was about the sopes, which smelled of the grave; the second was about the university: I saw it in ruins; the third was about the university (me running naked in the middle of a crowd of zombies); the fourth was about the moon over Mexico City; the fifth about a dead singer; the sixth about a secret community living in the sewers of Chapultepec; and the seventh about a lost book and friendship. Those were the results, plus a physical and spiritual sense of loneliness.

A couple of drunks tried to bother me, but young as I may be, I can take care of myself. A waitress (I found out her name is Brígida; she said she remembered me from the other night with Belano and Lima) stroked my hair. She did it absentmindedly, as she went by to wait on another table. Afterward she sat with me for a while and hinted that my hair was too long. She was nice, but I decided it was better not to respond. At three in the morning I went home. Still no visceral realists. Will I ever see them again?

NOVEMBER 5

No news of my friends. I haven't been to class in two days. And I don't plan to go back to Álamo's workshop either. This afternoon I was at the Encrucijada Veracruzana again (the bar on Bucareli), but no sign of the visceral realists. It's funny the way a place like that changes from afternoon to night or even morning. You'd think it was a completely different bar. This afternoon it seemed much filthier than it really is. The grisly night crowd hadn't shown up yet, and the clientele was-how should I put it-more furtive, less mysterious, and more peaceable. Three low-level office workers, probably civil servants, completely drunk; a street vendor who'd sold all his sea turtle eggs, standing next to his empty basket; two high school students; a gray-haired man sitting at a table eating enchiladas. The waitresses were different too. I didn't recognize the three who were on duty today, although one of them came right up to me and said: you must be the poet. This flustered me. Still, I was flattered, I have to admit.

"Yes, I'm a poet, but how did you know?"

"Brígida told me about you."

Brígida, the waitress!

"And what did she tell you?" I asked, not daring to use the informal tú with her yet.

"That you wrote some very pretty poems."

"There's no way she could know that. She's never read any of my work," I said, blushing a little, but increasingly satisfied by the turn the conversation was taking. It also occurred to me that Brígida might have read some of my poems-over my shoulder! That I didn't like so much.

The waitress (her name was Rosario) asked me to do her a favor. I should have said, "It depends," as my uncle had taught me (to the point of exhaustion), but that's not the way I am. All right, then, I said, what?

"I'd like you to write me a poem," she said.

"Consider it done. One of these days I promise you I will," I said, using tú with her for the first time and finally getting up the courage to order another tequila.

"It's on me," she said. "But you have to write it now."

I tried to explain you can't just write a poem that way, on the spot.

"Anyway, what's the hurry?"

Her explanation was somewhat vague; it seemed to involve a promise made to the Virgen de Guadalupe, something to do with the health of someone, a very dear and longed-for family member who had disappeared and come back again. But what did a poem have to do with all that? It occurred to me that I'd had too much to drink and hadn't eaten in hours, and I wondered whether the alcohol and hunger must be starting to disconnect me from reality. But then I decided it didn't matter. If I'm remembering right (though I wouldn't stake my life on it), it so happens that one of the visceral realists' basic poetry-writing tenets is a momentary disconnection from a certain kind of reality. Anyway, the bar had emptied out, so the other two waitresses drifted over to my table and then I was surrounded, in what seemed (and actually was) an innocent position but which to some uninformed spectator-a policeman, for example-might not have looked that way: a student sitting with three women standing around him, one of them brushing his left arm and shoulder with her right hip, the other two with their thighs pressed against the edge of the table (an edge that would surely leave a mark on those thighs), carrying on an innocent literary conversation, but a conversation that might look like something else entirely if you saw it from the doorway. Like a pimp in conference with his charges. Like a sex-crazed student refusing to be seduced.

I decided to get out while I still could, and doing my best to stand up, I paid, sent my regards to Brígida, and left. When I stepped outside the sun was blinding.

NOVEMBER 6

Cut class again today. I got up early and caught the UNAM bus, but I got off at an earlier stop and spent the rest of the morning wandering around downtown. First I went into the Librería del Sótano and bought a book by Pierre Louys, then I crossed Júarez, bought a ham sandwich, and went to read and eat on a bench in the Alameda. Reading Louys's story, plus looking at the illustrations, gave me a colossal hard-on. I tried to get up and go someplace else, but with my dick in the state it was in, I couldn't walk without attracting attention and scandalizing not just whoever passed by but pedestrians in general. So I sat down again, closed the book, and brushed the crumbs off my jacket and pants. For a long time I watched something I thought was a squirrel climbing stealthily through the branches of a tree. After ten minutes (more or less), I realized that it wasn't a squirrel at all-it was a rat. An enormous rat! The discovery filled me with sadness. There I was, unable to move, and twenty yards away, clinging tightly to a branch, was a starving, scavenging rat, in search of birds' eggs, or crumbs swept by the wind up to the treetops (unlikely), or whatever it was he was looking for. Anguish choked me, and I felt sick. Before I could throw up, I got up and ran away. After five minutes of brisk walking, my erection had disappeared.

I spent the evening on Calle Corazón (the street one block over from mine), watching a soccer game. The people playing were my childhood friends, although friends is maybe too strong a word. Mostly they're still in high school but some have left school and gone to work with their parents or don't do anything. When I started college, the gulf between us suddenly deepened and now it's as if we're from different planets. I asked if I could play. The light on Calle Corazón isn't very good, and you could hardly see the ball. Also, every once in a while cars would go by and we'd have to stop. I got kicked twice and slammed once in the face with the ball. Enough. I'll read a little more Pierre Louys and then turn out the light.

NOVEMBER 7

There are fourteen million people living in Mexico City. I'll never see the visceral realists again. And I'll never go back to the university or to Álamo's workshop either. I don't know what I'm going to tell my aunt and uncle. I finished Aphrodite, the book by Louys, and now I'm reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.

NOVEMBER 8

I've discovered an amazing poem. They never said anything about its author, Efrén Rebolledo (1877-1929), in any of our literature classes. I'll copy it here:

The Vampire

The first time I read it (a few hours ago), I couldn't help locking myself in my room and masturbating as I recited it once, twice, three times, as many as ten or fifteen times, imagining Rosario, the waitress, on all fours above me, asking me to write a poem for her long-lost beloved relative or begging me to pound her on the bed with my throbbing cock.

Now that I've gotten that over with, I've had some time to think about the poem.

There can be no doubt, I think, about the meaning of "deep and gloomy tresses." The same isn't true of the first line of the second stanza: "As I unlock the tight rings," which could refer to the "deep and gloomy tresses" and to drawing them out or untangling them one by one, but the verb unlock might conceal a different meaning.

"The tight rings" isn't very clear either. Does it mean curls of pubic hair, the vampire's curly tresses, or the human orifices-plural? I.e., is he sodomizing her? I think I'm still haunted by my reading of Pierre Louys.

NOVEMBER 9

I've decided to go back to the Encrucijada Veracruzana, not because I expect to find the visceral realists there, but to see Rosario. I've written a few lines for her. I talk about her eyes and the endless Mexican horizon, about abandoned churches and mirages over the roads that lead to the border. I don't know why, but somehow I got the idea that Rosario is from Veracruz or Tabasco, possibly even Yucatán. Maybe she mentioned it, although I may have just made it up. Or maybe the name of the bar confused me, and Rosario isn't from Veracruz or Yucatán at all. Maybe she's from Mexico City. Anyway, I thought that some poetry evoking lands that are the diametric opposite of hers (assuming she is from Veracruz, which seems more and more unlikely) would be more promising, at least as far as my intentions are concerned. After that, whatever happens will happen.

This morning I wandered around downtown thinking about my life. The future doesn't exactly look bright, especially if I keep cutting class. But what really worries me is my sexual education. I can't spend my whole life jerking off. (I'm worried about my poetic education too, but one thing at a time.) Could Rosario have a boyfriend? If she does have a boyfriend, what if he's jealous and possessive? She's too young to be married, but you never know. I think she likes me; that much is clear.

NOVEMBER 10

I found the visceral realists. Rosario is from Veracruz. All the visceral realists gave me their respective addresses, and I gave them all mine. They meet at Café Quito, on Bucareli, a little past the Encrucijada, and at María Font's house, in Colonia Condesa, or at the painter Catalina O'Hara's house, in Colonia Coyoacán. (María Font, Catalina O'Hara, such evocative names-but what is it they evoke?)

As for the rest of it, everything went fine, although it almost ended in tragedy.

Here's what happened: I got to the Encrucijada at eight. The bar was packed, the crowd grim and grisly beyond belief. In a corner there was actually a blind man playing the accordion and singing. All the same, I elbowed my way into the first opening I spotted at the bar. Rosario wasn't there. When I asked the girl behind the bar where Rosario was, she acted as if the question were somehow fickle, flighty, presuming. But she was smiling, as if she didn't think that was so bad. Honestly, I had no idea what she was trying to get at. Then I asked her where Rosario was from, and she told me that she was from Veracruz. I asked her where she was from too. From here, from Mexico City, she said. What about you? I'm a cowboy from Sonora, I said. I'm not sure why, it just popped out. In real life, I've never been to Sonora. She laughed, and we might have kept talking for a while, but she had to go wait on a table. But Brígida was there, and when I was on my second tequila, she came over and asked me how I was. Brígida is a woman with a frowning, melancholy, offended look. I remembered her differently, but I'd been drunk the time before, and this time I wasn't. Brígida, I said, how's it going, long time no see. I was trying to seem friendly, even cheerful, though I can't say I felt that way exactly. Brígida took my hand and pressed it to her heart, which made me jump, and my first impulse was to back away from the bar, maybe even just take off, but I restrained myself.

"Do you feel it?" she said.

"What?"

"My heart, you idiot, can't you feel it beating?"

With my fingertips I explored as much territory as I could: Brígida's linen blouse and her breasts, framed by a bra that seemed too small to contain them. But no trace of a heartbeat.

"I don't feel anything," I said with a smile.

"My heart, bonehead, can't you hear it beating, can't you feel it slowly breaking?"

"I'm sorry, I can't hear anything."

"How do you expect to hear anything with your hand, lamebrain, I'm just asking whether you feel it. Don't your fingers feel anything?"

"Honestly… no."

"Your hand is icy," said Brígida. "Such pretty fingers. It's obvious you've never had to work."

I felt watched, scrutinized, bored into. The grisly drunks at the bar had taken an interest in Brígida's last remark. Preferring not to confront them just yet, I announced that she was wrong, that of course I had to work to pay my tuition. Now Brígida was gripping my hand as if she were about to read my palm. That interested me, and I forgot about the potential spectators.

"Don't be cagey," she said. "You don't have to lie to me, I know you. You're rich and spoiled, but you're very ambitious. And lucky. You'll go as far as you want to go. Although here I see that you'll lose your way several times, and it'll be your own fault, because you don't know what you want. You need a girl to stand by you in good times and bad. Am I wrong?"

"No, that's perfect, keep going, keep going."

"Not here," said Brígida. "There's no reason these nosy bastards should hear your fortune, is there?"

For the first time I dared to take a good look around. Four or five grisly drunks were still hanging on Brígida's words, one of them even staring at my hand with unnatural intensity, as if it were his own. I smiled at all of them, not wanting to upset them, trying to let them know this had nothing to do with me. Brígida pinched the back of my hand. Her eyes were burning, as if she were about to start a fight or burst into tears.

"We can't talk here, follow me."

I watched her whisper to one of the waitresses, then she beckoned to me. The Encrucijada Veracruzana was full, and a cloud of smoke and the music of the blind man's accordion rose over the heads of the regulars. I looked at the clock. It was almost twelve; time is flying, I thought.

I followed her.

We went into a kind of long, narrow storage room piled with cartons of bottles and cleaning supplies for the bar (detergent, brooms, bleach, a squeegee, a collection of rubber gloves). At the back stood a table and two chairs. Brígida motioned me toward one of them. I sat down. The table was round and its surface was covered with gouges and names, mainly illegible. The waitress remained standing, less than an inch from me, watchful as a goddess or a bird of prey. Maybe she was waiting for me to ask her to sit. Touched by her shyness, I did. To my surprise, she proceeded to sit on my lap. The situation was uncomfortable and yet in a few seconds I realized with horror that my instincts, taking leave of my mind, my soul, and even my most shameful wishes, were stiffening my dick to the point that it was impossible to hide. Brígida surely noticed the state I was in, because she got up and, after studying me again from above, offered me a blow job.

"What…" I said.

"A blow job, do you want me to give you a blow job?"

I looked at her blankly, although the truth, like a lone and flagging swimmer, was gradually making some headway in the black sea of my ignorance. She stared back at me. Her eyes were hard and flat. And there was something about her that distinguished her from every other human being I'd known up until then: she always (wherever you were, whatever the circumstances, no matter what was happening) looked you straight in the eye. Brígida's gaze, I decided then, could be unbearable.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Baby, I'm talking about sucking your dick."

I didn't have time to reply, which was probably all for the best. Without taking her eyes off me, Brígida kneeled down, unzipped my pants, and took my cock in her mouth. First the head, which she nibbled, the bites no less disturbing for being light, and then, showing no signs of choking, the whole penis. At the same time, she ran her right hand over my lower abdomen, stomach, and chest, slapping me hard at regular intervals and giving me bruises I still have. The pain probably helped make the pleasure I felt even more exquisite, but it also prevented me from coming. Every so often, Brígida would lift her eyes from her work, although without releasing my member, and search for my eyes. Then I would close my own and mentally recite random lines from the poem "The Vampire," which later, when I reviewed the incident, turned out not to be lines from "The Vampire" at all, but an unholy mixture of poetry from different sources, my uncle's pronouncements, childhood memories, the faces of actresses I loved in puberty (Angélica María's face in black and white, for example), a whirlwind of spinning scenes. At first I tried to shield myself from the slaps, but once I realized that my efforts were futile, my hands went to Brígida's hair (dyed a light chestnut color and not very clean, as I discovered) and her ears, which were small and fleshy but almost unnaturally tough, as if they weren't made of flesh and blood at all, only cartilage or plastic, or no: barely tempered metal, from which hung two big fake silver hoops.

When the end was near, and in order not to cry out I had raised my fists and was shaking them at some invisible being slithering along the walls of the storage room, the door opened suddenly (but silently), and a waitress's head appeared, a terse warning issuing from her lips:

"Look out!"

Brígida immediately abandoned her task. She got up, looked me in the eyes with an expression of great suffering, and then, pulling me by the jacket, led me to a door I hadn't noticed before.

"See you next time, baby," she said, her voice much throatier than usual, as she pushed me through the door.

Suddenly, I found myself in the toilets of the Encrucijada Vera-cruzana, a long, gloomy, rectangular room. I stumbled around a little, still dazed by how quickly things had just happened. It smelled like disinfectant and the floor was wet, and partly flooded. The lighting was dim to nonexistent. Between two chipped sinks, I saw a mirror, and glancing sideways at myself, I caught an image in the mercury that made my hair stand on end. In silence, and trying not to splash in the rivulet that I'd just noticed trickling from one of the stalls, I turned back to the mirror, drawn by curiosity. The mirror revealed a cuneiform face, dark red and beaded with sweat. I sprang backward and almost fell. There was someone in one of the toilets. I heard him mutter, swear. One of the regulars, I assumed. Then someone called me by my name:

"Poet García Madero."

I saw two shadows next to the urinals. They were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. Two queers, I thought. Two queers who know my name?

"Poet García Madero. Come closer, man."

Although logic and prudence urged me to find the door and leave the Encrucijada without further delay, what I did was take two steps toward the smoke. Two pairs of bright eyes were watching me, like the eyes of wolves in a gale (poetic license: I've never seen a wolf; I have seen gales, though, and they didn't really go with the mantle of smoke that enveloped the two strangers). I heard them laugh. Hee hee hee. There was a smell of marijuana. I relaxed.

"Poet García Madero, your thing is hanging out."

"What?"

"Hee hee hee."

"Your penis… It's hanging out."

I patted my fly. It was true. I'd been so flustered I really had forgotten to tuck myself back in. I blushed, and thought about telling them to go fuck themselves, but I contained myself, fixed my pants, and took a step in their direction. They looked familiar, and I tried to pierce the surrounding darkness and decipher their faces. No luck.

Then a hand, followed by an arm, emerged from the globe of smoke around them. The hand offered me the end of a joint.

"I don't smoke," I said.

"It's weed, poet García Madero. Acapulco Gold."

I shook my head.

"I don't like it," I said.

I was startled by a noise in the room next door. Somebody's voice was raised. A man's. Then someone shouted. A woman. Brígida. I was sure the owner of the bar was hitting her and I wanted to come to her defense, although the truth is I didn't care all that much about Brígida (I didn't care about her at all, really). Just as I was turning back toward the door, the strangers' hands grabbed me. Then I saw their faces emerge from the smoke. It was Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano.

I sighed with relief, I almost burst into applause; I told them that I had been looking for them for days. Then I made another attempt to come to the aid of the shouting woman, but they wouldn't let me.

"Don't make trouble for yourself, those two are always at it," said Belano.

"Who?"

"The waitress and her boss."

"But he's hitting her," I said. The slaps were clearly audible now. "We can't just let him hit her."

"Ah, García Madero, what a poet," said Ulises Lima.

"You're right, we couldn't let him hit her," said Belano, "but things aren't always the way they sound. Trust me."

Clearly they knew all about the Encrucijada, and I would have liked to ask them some questions, but I didn't want to seem indiscreet.

When I came out of the toilets, the light of the bar hurt my eyes. Everybody was talking at the top of their lungs. Some people were singing along to the blind man's song, a bolero, or what sounded to me like a bolero, about a desperate love, a love that time could never heal, although with the passage of the years it became more humiliating, more pathetic, more terrible. Lima and Belano were carrying three books apiece, and they looked like students, like me. Before we left, we went up to the bar, shoulder to shoulder, and ordered three tequilas which we downed in a single gulp, and then we went out into the street, laughing. As we left the Encrucijada, I looked back for the last time in the vain hope of seeing Brígida appear in the doorway to the storage room, but she wasn't there.

Ulises Lima's books were:

Manifeste électrique aux paupieres de jupes, by Michel Bulteau, Matthieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, Jean-Jacques Nguyen That, and Gyl Bert-Ram-Soutrenom F.M., and other poets of the Electric Movement, our French counterparts (I think).

Sang de satin, by Michel Bulteau.

Nord d'été naître opaque, by Matthieu Messagier.

The books Arturo Belano was carrying were:

Le parfait criminel, by Alain Jouffroy.

Le pays où tout est permis, by Sophie Podolski.

Cent mille milliards de poèmes, by Raymond Queneau. (The Queneau was a photocopy, and the way it had been folded, in addition to the wear and tear of too much handling, had turned it into a kind of startled paper flower, its petals splayed toward the four points of the compass.)

Later we met up with Ernesto San Epifanio, who was also carrying three books. I asked him to let me make a note of them. They were:

Little Johnny's Confession, by Brian Patten.

Tonight at Noon, by Adrian Henri.

The Lost Fire Brigade, by Spike Hawkins.

NOVEMBER 11

Ulises Lima lives in a room on a roof on Calle Anáhuac, near Insurgentes. It's a tiny place, ten feet by eight, with books piled up everywhere. Through the only window, as small as a porthole, you can see the neighboring rooftops, where human sacrifices are still performed, according to Ulises Lima, who got it from Monsiváis. In the room there's only a thin mattress on the floor, which Lima rolls up during the day or when he has visitors and uses as a sofa; there's also a tiny table, its entire top taken up by a typewriter, and a single chair. Visitors, obviously, have to sit on the mattress or the floor or just stand. Today there were five of us: Lima, Belano, Rafael Barrios, and Jacinto Requena. Belano took the chair, Barrios and Requena the mattress, Lima stood the whole time (sometimes pacing around the room), and I sat on the floor.

We talked about poetry. No one has read any of my poems, and yet they all treat me like one of them. The camaraderie is immediate and incredible!

Around nine, Felipe Müller showed up; he's nineteen, so until I came along he was the youngest in the group. Then we all went to eat at a Chinese café, and we walked and talked about literature until three in the morning. We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed. Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda. In other words, between a rock and a hard place.

I asked where I could buy the books they'd had with them the other night. The answer came as no surprise: they steal them from the Librería Francesa in the Zona Rosa and from the Librería Baudelaire on Calle General Martínez, near Calle Horacio, in Polanco. I also asked about the authors, and one after another (what one visceral realist reads is soon read by the rest of the group) they filled me in on the life and works of the Electrics, Raymond Queneau, Sophie Podolski, and Alain Jouffroy.

Felipe Müller asked if I could read French. He sounded a tiny bit annoyed. I told him that with a dictionary I could get along all right. Later I asked him the same question. You read French, don't you, mano? He answered in the negative.

NOVEMBER 12

Ran into Jacinto Requena, Rafael Barrios, and Pancho Rodríguez at Café Quito. I saw them come in around nine and motioned them over to my table, where I had just spent three good hours writing and reading. They introduced me to Pancho Rodríguez. He's as short as Barrios, and has the face of a twelve-year-old, even though he's actually twenty-two. It was almost inevitable that we'd like each other. Pancho Rodríguez never stops talking. Thanks to him I found out that before Belano and Müller showed up (they came to Mexico City after the Pinochet coup, so they weren't part of the original group), Ulises Lima had published a magazine with poems by María Font, Angélica Font, Laura Damián, Barrios, San Epifanio, some guy called Marcelo Robles I'd never heard of, and the Rodríguez brothers, Pancho and Moctezuma. According to Pancho, Pancho himself is one of the two best young Mexican poets, and the other one is Ulises Lima, who Pancho says is his best friend. The magazine (two issues, both from 1974) was called Lee Harvey Oswald and was bankrolled entirely by Lima. Requena (who wasn't part of the group back then) and Barrios confirmed everything Pancho Rodríguez said. That was how visceral realism started, said Barrios. Pancho Rodríguez thought otherwise. According to him, Lee Harvey Oswald should have continued. It folded just as it was taking off, he said, just as people were starting to know who we were. What people? Well, other poets, of course, literature students, and the poetry-writing girls who came each week to the hundred workshops blossoming like flowers in Mexico City. Barrios and Requena disagreed about the magazine, even though they both looked back on it with nostalgia.

"Are there a lot of poetesses?"

"It's lame to call them poetesses," said Pancho.

"You're supposed to call them poets," said Barrios.

"But are there lots of them?"

"Like never before in the history of Mexico," said Pancho. "Lift a stone and you'll find a girl writing about her little life."

"So how could Lima finance Lee Harvey Oswald all by himself?" I said.

I thought it prudent not to insist just then on the subject of poetesses.

"Oh, poet García Madero, Ulises Lima is the kind of guy who'll do anything for poetry," said Barrios dreamily.

Then we talked about the name of the magazine, which I thought was brilliant.

"Let's see if I understand. Poets, according to Ulises Lima, are like Lee Harvey Oswald. Is that it?"

"More or less," said Pancho Rodríguez. "I suggested that he should call it Los bastardos de Sor Juana, which sounds more Mexican, but our friend is crazy about anything to do with gringos."

"Actually, Ulises thought there was already a publishing house with the same name, but he was wrong, and when he realized his mistake he decided to use the name for his magazine," said Barrios.

"What publishing house?"

"P.-J. Oswald, in Paris, the place that published a book by Matthieu Messagier."

"And that dumbass Ulises thought that the French publishing house was named for the assassin. But it was P.-J. Oswald, not L. H. Oswald, and one day he realized and decided to take the name."

"The French guy's name must be Pierre-Jacques," said Requena.

"Or Paul-Jean Oswald."

"Does his family have money?" I asked.

"No, Ulises's family doesn't have money," said Requena. "Actually, the only family he has is his mother, right? Or at least I've never heard of anyone else."

"I know his whole family," said Pancho. "I knew Ulises Lima long before any of you, long before Belano, and his mother is the only family he has. He's broke, that I can promise you."

"Then how could he finance two issues of a magazine?"

"Selling weed," said Pancho. The other two were quiet, but they didn't deny it.

"I can't believe it," I said.

"Well, it's true. The money comes from marijuana."

"Shit."

"He goes and gets it in Acapulco and then he delivers it to his clients in Mexico City."

"Shut up, Pancho," said Barrios.

"Why should I shut up? The kid's a fucking visceral realist, isn't he? So why do I have to shut up?"

NOVEMBER 13

I spent all of today following Lima and Belano. We walked, took the subway, buses, a pesero, walked some more, and the whole time we never stopped talking. Sometimes they'd go into houses, and then I had to wait outside for them. When I asked what they were doing they told me that they were taking a survey. But I think they're making deliveries of marijuana. Along the way I read them the latest poems I'd written, eleven or twelve of them. I think they liked them.

NOVEMBER 14

Today I went with Pancho Rodríguez to the Font sisters' house.

I'd been at Café Quito for four hours, I'd already had three cups of coffee, and I was losing my appetite for reading and writing when Pancho showed up and invited me to come with him. I leaped at the invitation.

The Fonts live in Colonia Condesa, in a beautiful two-story house on Calle Colima, with a front yard and a courtyard in back. The front is nothing special, just a few stunted trees and some ragged grass, but the courtyard is another story: the trees are big, and there are enormous plants with leaves so intensely green they look black, a small tiled pool that can't quite be called a fountain (there are no fish in it, but there is a battery-powered submarine, property of Jorgito Font, the youngest brother), and a little outbuilding completely separate from the big house. At one time it was probably a carriage house or stables and now it's where the Font sisters live. Before we got there, Pancho gave me a heads-up:

"Angélica's father is kind of nuts. If you see something strange, don't be scared, just do whatever I do and act like nothing's happening. If he starts to make trouble, don't worry. We'll take him down."

"Take him down?" I wasn't quite sure what he meant. "The two of us? In his own house?"

"His wife would be eternally grateful. The guy's a total headcase. A year or so ago he spent time in the bin. But don't repeat that to the Font sisters. Or if you do, don't say you heard it from me."

"So he's crazy," I said.

"Crazy and broke. Until recently they had two cars and three servants, and they were always throwing these big parties. But somehow he blew a fuse, poor fucker, and just lost it. Now he's ruined."

"But it must cost money to keep up this house."

"They own it. It's all they've got left."

"What did Mr. Font do before he went crazy?" I said.

"He was an architect, but not a very good one. He designed the two issues of Lee Harvey Oswald."

"No shit."

When we rang the bell, a bald man with a mustache and a deranged look came to let us in.

"That's Angélica's father," Pancho whispered to me.

"I figured," I said.

The man came striding up to the gate, fixing us with a look of intense hatred. I was happy to be on the other side of the bars. After hesitating for a few seconds, as if he wasn't sure what to do, he opened the gate and charged. I jumped back, but Pablo spread his arms wide and greeted him effusively. The man stopped then and extended an unsteady hand before he let us through. Pancho walked briskly around the house to the back, and I followed him. Mr. Font went back inside, talking to himself. As we headed down a flower-filled outside passageway between the front and back gardens, Pancho explained that another reason for poor Mr. Font's agitation was his daughter Angélica:

"María has already lost her virginity," said Pancho, "but Angélica hasn't yet, although she's about to, and the old man knows it and it drives him crazy."

"How does he know?"

"One of the mysteries of fatherhood, I guess. Anyway, he spends all day wondering which son of a bitch will deflower his daughter, and it's just too much for one man to bear. Deep down, I understand him; if I were in his shoes I'd feel the same."

"But does he have someone in mind or does he suspect everyone?"

"He suspects everyone, of course, although two or three are out of the running: the queers and her sister. The old man isn't stupid."

None of it made any sense.

"Last year Angélica won the Laura Damián poetry prize, you know, when she was only sixteen."

I'd never heard of the prize in my life. According to what Pancho told me later, Laura Damián was a poetess who died before she turned twenty, in 1972, and her parents had established a prize in her memory. According to Pancho, the prize was very highly regarded "among the true elite." I gave him a look, as if to ask what kind of an idiot he was, but Pancho didn't notice. He seemed to be waiting for something. Then he raised his eyes skyward and I thought I noticed a curtain move in one of the windows on the second floor. Maybe it was just the breeze, but I felt watched until I crossed the threshold of the Font sisters' little house.

Only María was home.

María is tall and dark, with very straight black hair, a straight (absolutely straight) nose, and thin lips. She looks like a nice person, though it's not hard to see that her rages might be long and terrible. We found her standing in the middle of the room, practicing dance steps, reading Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, listening to a Billie Holiday record, and absentmindedly painting a watercolor of two women holding hands at the foot of a volcano, surrounded by streams of lava. She received us coldly at first, as if Pancho's presence annoyed her and she was only putting up with him for her sister's sake and because, in all fairness, the little house in the courtyard wasn't hers alone but belonged to both of them. She didn't even look at me.

To make matters worse, I managed to make a banal remark about Sor Juana that prejudiced her against me even more (a clumsy allusion to the celebrated lines "Misguided men, who will chastise/a woman when no blame is due,/oblivious that it is you/who prompted what you criticize") and that I made worse when I tried again by reciting, "Stay, shadow of contentment too short-lived,/illusion of enchantment I most prize,/fair image for whom happily I die,/sweet fiction for whom painfully I live."

So suddenly there we were, the three of us, sunk in timid or sullen silence, and María Font wouldn't even look at Pancho and me, although sometimes I looked at her or the watercolor (or to be more precise, stole glances at her and the watercolor), and Pancho Rodríguez, who seemed completely unaffected by María's hostility or her father's, was looking at the books, whistling a song that as far as I could tell had nothing to do with what Billie Holiday was singing, until at last Angélica appeared, and then I understood Pancho (he was one of the men who wanted to deflower Angélica!), and I almost understood Mr. Font, although to be honest, virginity doesn't mean much to me. (I'm a virgin myself, after all, unless Brígida's fellatio interrupta is considered a deflowering. But is that making love with a woman? Wouldn't I have had to simultaneously lick her pussy to say that we'd actually made love? To stop being a virgin, does it only count if a man sticks his dick into a woman's vagina, not her mouth, her ass, or her armpit? To say that I've really made love, do I have to have ejaculated? It's all so complicated.)

But as I was saying, Angélica appeared, and to judge by the way she greeted Pancho, it was clear (to me at least) that he had some romantic possibilities with the prize-winning poet. As soon as he introduced me, I was ignored again.

The two of them set up a screen that divided the room in two, and then they sat on the bed and I could hear them whispering to each other.

I went over to María and said a few things about how good her watercolor was. She didn't even look up. I tried another tactic: I talked about visceral realism and Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. I also analyzed (intrepidly: the whispers on the other side of the screen were making me more and more nervous) the watercolor before me as a visceral realist work. María Font looked at me for the first time and smiled:

"I don't give a shit about the visceral realists."

"But I thought you were part of the group. The movement, I mean."

"Are you kidding? Maybe if they'd chosen a less disgusting name… I'm a vegetarian. Anything to do with viscera makes me sick."

"What would you have called it?"

"Oh, I don't know. The Mexican Section of Surrealists, maybe."

"I think there already is a Mexican Section of Surrealists in Cuernavaca. Anyway, what we're trying to do is create a movement on a Latin American scale."

"On a Latin American scale? Please."

"Well, that's what we want in the long term, if I understand it correctly."

"Who are you, anyway?"

"I'm a friend of Lima and Belano."

"So why haven't I ever seen you around here?"

"I only met them a little while ago…"

"You're the kid from Álamo's workshop, aren't you?"

I turned red, although really I don't know why. I admitted that we had met there.

"So there's already a Mexican Section of Surrealists in Cuernavaca," said María thoughtfully. "Maybe I should go live in Cuernavaca."

"I read about it in the Excelsior. It's some old men who paint. A group of tourists, I think."

"Leonora Carrington lives in Cuernavaca," said María. "You're not talking about her, are you?"

"Um, no," I said. I have no idea who Leonora Carrington is.

Then we heard a moan. It wasn't a moan of pleasure, I could tell that right away, but a moan of pain. It occurred to me then that it had been a while since we heard anything from behind the screen.

"Are you all right, Angélica?" said María.

"Of course I'm all right. Go take a walk please, and take that guy with you," responded the muffled voice of Angélica Font.

In a gesture of annoyance and boredom, María threw her paintbrushes onto the floor. From the paint marks on the tiles, I could tell that it wasn't the first time her sister had requested a little privacy.

"Come with me."

I followed her to a secluded corner of the courtyard, beside a high wall covered in vines, where there was a table and five metal chairs.

"Do you think they're…?" I said, and immediately I regretted my curiosity, which I'd hoped she'd share. Luckily, María was too angry to pay much attention to me.

"Fucking? No way."

For a while we sat in silence. María drummed her fingers on the table, and I crossed and recrossed my legs a few times and busied myself studying the plants in the courtyard.

"All right, what are you waiting for? Read me your poems," she said.

I read and read until one of my legs fell asleep. When I finished I was afraid to ask whether she'd liked them or not. Then María invited me into the big house for coffee.

In the kitchen, we found her mother and father, cooking. They seemed happy. She introduced me to them. Her father didn't look deranged anymore. He was actually pretty nice to me; he asked me what I was studying, how I planned to balance law and poetry, how good old Álamo was (it seems they know each other, or were childhood friends). Her mother talked about vague things that I can hardly remember: I think she mentioned a séance in Coyoacán that she'd been to recently, and the restless spirit of a 1940s rancheras singer. I couldn't tell whether she was joking or not.

In front of the TV we found Jorgito Font. María didn't speak to him or introduce us. He's twelve years old, has long hair, and dresses like a bum. He calls everybody naco or naca. To his mother he says no way, naca, no can do; to his father, naco, check it out; to his sister, that's my naca or naca, you're the best. To me he said hey, naco, what's going on?

Nacos, as far as I know, are urban Indians, city Indians. Jorgito must be using the word in some other sense.

NOVEMBER 15

Back at the Fonts' house today.

Things happened exactly as they did yesterday, with minor variations.

Pancho and I met at El Loto de Quintana Roo, a Chinese café near the Glorieta de Insurgentes, and after having several cups of coffee and something a little more substantial (paid for by me), we headed for Colonia Condesa.

Once again Mr. Font came to the door when we rang the bell, in the exact same state as yesterday; if anything, he was a few steps farther down the path to madness. His eyes bulged from their sockets when he accepted the cheerful hand Pancho offered him, unperturbed, and he showed no sign of recognizing me.

María was by herself in the little house in the courtyard; she was painting the same watercolor as before and in her left hand she held the same book, but it was Olga Guillot's voice, not Billie Holiday's, coming out of the record player.

Her greeting was just as cold.

Pancho, for his part, repeated the previous day's routine and took a seat in a little wicker armchair while he waited for Angélica to arrive.

This time I was careful not to make any value judgments about Sor Juana, and I occupied myself first by looking at the books and then the watercolor, standing near María but keeping a prudent distance. The watercolor had undergone significant changes. The two women beside the volcano, whom I remembered in a stern or at least serious pose, were now pinching each other's arms; one of them was laughing or pretending to laugh; the other one was crying or pretending to cry. Floating on the streams of lava (clearly lava, since it was still red or vermillion) were laundry detergent bottles, bald dolls, and wicker baskets full of rats; the women's dresses were torn or patched; in the sky (or at least in the upper part of the watercolor), a storm was brewing; in the lower part María had reproduced this morning's weather report for Mexico City.

The painting was hideous.

Then Angélica came in, glowing, and once again she and Pablo set up the screen. I spent a while thinking, as María painted: there was no longer the slightest doubt in my mind that Pancho had dragged me to the Fonts' house so that I could distract María while he and Angélica went about their business. It didn't seem very fair. Before, at the Chinese café, I'd asked him whether he considered himself a visceral realist. His reply was ambiguous and lengthy. He talked about the working class, drugs, Flores Magón, some key figures of the Mexican Revolution. Then he said that his poems would definitely appear in the magazine that Belano and Lima were putting out soon. And if they don't publish me, they can go fuck themselves, he said. I don't know why, but I get the feeling the only thing Pancho cares about is sleeping with Angélica.

"Are you all right, Angélica?" said María, when the moans of pain, exactly the same as yesterday's, began.

"Yes, yes, I'm fine. Can you go take a walk?"

"Of course," said María.

Once again we resignedly settled ourselves at the metal table under the climbing vine. For no apparent reason, my heart was broken. María started to tell me stories about their childhood, thoroughly boring stories that it was clear she was only telling to pass the time and that I pretended to find interesting. Elementary school, their first parties, high school, their shared love of poetry, dreams of traveling, of seeing other countries, Lee Harvey Oswald, in which they'd both been published, the Laura Damián prize that Angélica had won… Once she reached this point (I don't know why; possibly because she stopped talking for a minute), I asked who Laura Damián had been. It was pure intuition. María said:

"A poet who died young."

"I already know that. When she was twenty. But who was she? Why haven't I read anything by her?"

"Have you ever read Lautréamont, García Madero?" said María.

"No."

"Well, then, it's no surprise that you've never heard of Laura Damián."

"I'm sorry. I know I'm ignorant."

"That's not what I said. All I meant was that you're very young. Anyway, Laura's only book, La fuente de las musas, was privately published. It was a posthumous book subsidized by her parents, who loved her very much and were her first readers."

"They must have lots of money."

"Why do you think that?"

"If they're able to fund an annual poetry prize themselves, they have to have lots of money."

"Well, not really. They didn't give Angélica much. The prize is more about prestige than money. It's not even all that prestigious. After all, they only give it to poets under the age of twenty."

"The age Laura Damián was when she died. How morbid."

"It isn't morbid, it's sad."

"And were you there when the prize was awarded? Do the parents give it in person?"

"Of course."

"Where? At their house?"

"No, at the university."

"Which department?"

"The literature department. That's where Laura was studying."

"Jesus, that's so morbid."

"None of it seems morbid to me. If you ask me, you're the morbid one, García Madero."

"You know what? It pisses me off when you call me García Madero. It's like me calling you Font."

"Everybody calls you that, so why should I call you anything different?"

"Fine, never mind. Tell me more about Laura Damián. Didn't you ever enter the contest?"

"Yes, but Angélica won."

"And who won before Angélica?"

"A girl from Aguascalientes who studies medicine at UNAM."

"And before that?"

"Before that, no one won, because the prize didn't exist. Next year maybe I'll enter again, or maybe I won't."

"And what will you do with the money if you win?"

"Go to Europe, probably."

For a few seconds we were both silent, María Font thinking about unexplored foreign countries, while I thought about all the foreign men who would make love to her night and day. The thought startled me. Was I falling in love with María?

"How did Laura Damián die?"

"She was hit by a car in Tlalpan. She was an only child, and her parents were devastated. I think her mother even tried to commit suicide. It must be sad to die so young."

"It must be extremely sad," I said, imagining María Font in the arms of a seven-foot-tall Englishman, so white he was practically an albino, his long pink tongue between her thin lips.

"Do you know who you should ask about Laura Damián?"

"No, who?"

"Ulises Lima. He was friends with her."

"Ulises Lima?"

"Yes, they were inseparable, they were in school together, they went to the movies together, they lent each other books. They were very good friends."

"I had no idea," I said.

We heard a noise from the little house, and for a while we both sat expectantly.

"How old was Ulises Lima when Laura Damián died?"

María didn't answer for a while.

"Ulises Lima's name isn't Ulises Lima," she said in a husky voice.

"Do you mean it's his pen name?"

María nodded her head yes, her gaze lost in the intricate tracings of the vine.

"What's his real name, then?"

"Alfredo Martínez, something like that. I don't remember anymore. But when I met him he wasn't called Ulises Lima. It was Laura Damián who gave him that name."

"Wow, that's crazy."

"Everyone said that he was in love with Laura. But I don't think they ever slept together. I think Laura died a virgin."

"At twenty?"

"Sure, why not."

"No, of course, you're right."

"Sad, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is sad. And how old was Ulises, or Alfredo Martínez, then?"

"A year younger, nineteen, maybe eighteen."

"He must have taken it hard, I guess."

"He got sick. They say he was on the verge of death. The doctors didn't know what was wrong with him, just that he was fading fast. I went to see him at the hospital and I was there during the worst of it. But one day he got better and it all ended as mysteriously as it had begun. Then Ulises left the university and started his magazine. You've seen it, right?"

"Lee Harvey Oswald? Yes, I've seen it," I lied. Immediately I wondered why they hadn't let me have an issue, even just to leaf through, when I was in Ulises Lima's rooftop room.

"What a horrible name for a poetry magazine."

"I like it. It doesn't seem so bad to me."

"It's in terrible taste."

"What would you have called it?"

"I don't know. The Mexican Section of Surrealists, maybe."

"Interesting."

"Did you know that it was my father who laid out the whole magazine?"

"Pancho said something like that."

"It's the best part of the magazine, the design. Now everybody hates my father."

"Everybody? All the visceral realists? Why would they hate him? That doesn't make sense."

"No, not the visceral realists, the other architects in his studio. I guess they're jealous of how well he gets along with young people. Anyway, they can't stand him, and now they're making him pay. Because of the magazine."

"Because of Lee Harvey Oswald?"

"Of course. Since my father designed it at the studio, now they're making him responsible for anything that happens."

"But what could happen?"

"All kinds of things. Clearly you don't know Ulises Lima."

"No, I don't," I said, "but I'm getting some idea."

"He's a time bomb," said María.

Just then, I realized that it had gotten dark and that we could only hear, not see, each other.

"Listen, I have to tell you something. I just lied to you. I've never gotten my hands on the magazine, and I'm dying to take a look at it. Could you lend me a copy?"

"Of course. I'll give you one; I have extras."

"And could you lend me a book by Lautréamont too, please?"

"Yes, but that you absolutely have to return. He's one of my favorite poets."

"I promise," I said.

María went into the big house. I was left alone in the courtyard, and for a minute I couldn't believe that Mexico City was really out there. Then I heard voices in the Fonts' little house, and a light went on. I thought that it was Angélica and Pancho, and that in a little while Pancho would come out into the courtyard to find me, but nothing happened. When María returned with two copies of the magazine and the Chants de Maldoror, she too noticed that the lights were on in the little house, and for a few seconds she waited attentively. Suddenly, when I was least expecting it, she asked me whether I was still a virgin.

"No, of course not," I lied, for the second time that evening.

"And was it hard to lose your virginity?"

"A little," I said, after considering my response for a second.

I noticed that her voice had gotten husky again.

"Do you have a girlfriend?"

"No, of course not," I said.

"Who did you do it with, then? A prostitute?"

"No, with a girl from Sonora who I met last year," I said. "We were only together for three days."

"And you haven't done it with anyone else?"

I was tempted to tell her about my adventure with Brígida, but in the end I decided that it was better not to.

"No, nobody else," I said, and I felt so miserable I could have died.

NOVEMBER 16

I called María Font. I told her I wanted to see her. I begged her to come out. She said that she'd meet me at Café Quito. When she came in, around seven, several pairs of eyes followed her from the doorway all the way to the table where I was waiting.

She looked beautiful. She was wearing a Oaxacan blouse, very tight jeans, and leather sandals. Over her shoulder she was carrying a dark brown knapsack stamped with little cream-colored horses around the edges, full of books and papers.

I asked her to read me a poem.

"Don't be a drag, García Madero," she said.

I don't know why, but her saying that made me sad. I think I had a physical need to hear one of her poems from her own lips. But maybe it wasn't the place; Café Quito was loud with talk, shouts, shrieks of laughter. I gave her back the Lautréamont.

"You read it already?" said María.

"Of course," I said. "I stayed up all night reading. I read Lee Harvey Oswald too. What a great magazine, it's such a shame they had to fold. I loved your things."

"So you haven't been to bed yet?"

"Not yet, but I feel good. I'm wide awake."

María Font looked me in the eyes and smiled. A waitress came over and asked what she wanted to drink. Nothing, said María, we were just leaving. Outside, I asked whether she had somewhere to go, and she said no, she just wasn't in the mood for Café Quito. We went walking along Bucareli toward Reforma, then crossed Reforma and headed up Avenida Guerrero.

"This is where the whores are," said María.

"I didn't realize," I said.

"Give me your arm so nobody gets the wrong idea."

The truth is, at first I didn't see anything to suggest that the street was any different from those we had just been on. The traffic was heavy here too, and the people crowding the sidewalks were no different from the people streaming along Bucareli. But then (maybe because of what María had said) I started to notice some differences. To start with, the lighting. The streetlights on Bucareli are white, but on Avenida Guerrero they had more of an amber tone. The cars: on Bucareli it's unusual to find a car parked on the street; on Guerrero there were plenty. On Bucareli, the bars and coffee shops are open and bright; on Guerrero, although there were lots of bars, they seemed turned in on themselves, secret or discreet, with no big windows looking out. And finally, the music. On Bucareli there wasn't any. All the noise came from people or cars. On Guerrero, the farther in you got, especially on the corners of Violeta and Magnolia, the music took over the street, coming from bars, parked cars, and portable radios, and drifting from the lighted windows of dark buildings.

"I like this street," said María. "Someday I'm going to live here."

A group of teenage hookers was standing around an old Cadillac parked at the curb. María stopped and greeted one of them:

"Hey there, Lupe. Nice to see you."

Lupe was very thin and had short hair. I thought she was as beautiful as María.

"María! Wow, mana, long time no see," she said, and then she hugged her.

The girls with Lupe were still leaning on the hood of the Cadillac and their eyes rested on María, scrutinizing her calmly. They hardly looked at me.

"I thought you died," said María all of a sudden. The callousness of the remark stunned me. María's tact has these gaping holes.

"I'm plenty alive. But I almost died. Didn't I, Carmencita?"

"That's right," said the girl called Carmencita, and she continued to study María.

"It was Gloria who bit it. You met her, didn't you? Mana, what a fucking mess, but no one could stand that cunt."

"I never met her," said María with a smile on her lips.

"The cops are the ones who nailed her," said Carmencita.

"And has anyone done anything about it?" said María.

"Nelson," said Carmencita. "Do what? The bitch knew too much, she was in way over her head, there was nothing anyone could do."

"Well, how sad," said María.

"Say, how's school?" said Lupe.

"So-so," said María.

"You still got that hot stud running after you?"

María laughed and shot me a glance.

"My friend here is a ballerina," Lupe said to the other girls. "We met at Modern Dance, the school on Donceles."

"Yeah, sure," said Carmencita.

"It's true, Lupe hung out at the dance school," said María.

"So how did she end up here?" asked a girl who hadn't spoken before, the shortest one of all, almost a dwarf.

María looked at her and shrugged.

"Will you come have coffee with us?" she said.

Lupe checked the watch on her right wrist and then looked at her friends.

"The thing is, I'm working."

"Just for a little while, you'll be back soon," said María.

"All right, then. Work can wait," said Lupe. "I'll see you girls later." She started to walk with María. I walked behind them.

We turned left on Magnolia, onto Avenida Jesús García. Then we walked south again, to Héroes Revolucionarios Ferrocarrileros, where we went into a coffee shop.

"Is this the kid you've been fooling around with?" I heard Lupe say to María.

María laughed again.

"He's just a friend," she said, and to me: "If Lupe's pimp shows up here, you'll have to defend us both, García Madero."

I thought she was kidding. Then it occurred to me she might be serious and, frankly, the situation started to seem appealing. Just then I couldn't imagine a better way to look good in front of María. I felt happy. We had the whole night ahead of us.

"My man is heavy," said Lupe. "He doesn't like me to be running around with strangers." It was the first time she had looked directly at me when she spoke.

"But I'm not a stranger," said María.

"No, mana. Not you."

"Do you know how I met Lupe?" said María.

"I have no idea," I said.

"At the dance school. Lupe was Paco Duarte's girlfriend. Paco is the Spanish dancer who's the head of the school."

"I went to see him once a week," said Lupe.

"I didn't know you took dance lessons," I said.

"I don't. I just went there to fuck," said Lupe.

"I meant María, not you."

"Since I was fourteen," said María. "Too late to be a good ballerina. That's the way it goes."

"What do you mean? You're a great dancer! Weird, but the truth is everyone in that place is half insane. Have you seen her dance?" I said I hadn't. "You'd fall head over heels."

María shook her head to deny it. When the waitress came we ordered three coffees and Lupe also ordered a cheese sandwich, no beans.

"I can't digest them," she explained.

"How's your stomach?" said María.

"Not bad. Sometimes it hurts a lot, other times I forget it exists. It's nerves. When it gets to be too much, I just have a toke and it's fixed. So what about you? Aren't you going to the dance school anymore?"

"Not so often," said María.

"This idiot walked in on me once in Paco Duarte's office," said Lupe.

"I almost died laughing," said María. "Actually, I don't know why I started to laugh. Maybe I was in love with Paco and it was hysterics."

"Come on, mana, you know he wasn't your type."

"So what were you doing with this Paco Duarte?" I said.

"Nothing, really. I met him once on the street and since he couldn't come to me and I couldn't go to his house because he's married to a gringa, I'd go see him at the dance school. Anyway, I think that was what he liked, the scumbag. Fucking me in his office."

"And your pimp let you go that far out of your zone?" I said.

"My zone? What do you know about my zone? And who said I have a pimp?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. It's just that a minute ago María said your pimp was the violent type, didn't she?"

"I don't have a pimp. You think just because I'm talking to you, you have the right to insult me?"

"Calm down, Lupe. No one's being insulted," said María.

"This dickhead insulted my man," said Lupe. "If he hears you he'll show you. Little punk. He'll take you down in a second. I bet you wish you could suck my man's dick."

"Hey, I'm not a homosexual."

"All of María's friends are faggots, everybody knows that."

"Lupe, leave my friends alone. When Lupe was sick," María said to me, "Ernesto and I took her to the hospital. It's amazing how quickly some people forget a favor."

"Ernesto San Epifanio?" I said.

"Yes," said María.

"Did he take dance lessons too?"

"He used to," said María.

"Oh, Ernesto, I have such good memories of him. I remember he lifted me up all by himself and put me in a taxi. Ernesto is a faggot," Lupe explained to me, "but he's strong."

"It wasn't Ernesto who got you into the taxi, stupid, it was me," said María.

"That night I thought I was going to die," said Lupe. "I was fucked up and suddenly I felt sick and I was vomiting blood. Buckets of blood. Deep down, I don't think I would have cared if I did die. I was just remembering my son and my broken promise and the Virgen de Guadalupe. I'd been drinking until the moon came up, little by little, and since I didn't feel good, that dwarf girl you saw gave me some Flexo. That was my big mistake. The cement must have gone bad or I was already sick, but whatever it was, I started to die on a bench on the Plaza San Fernando and that was when my friend here showed up with her partner the faggot angel."

"Lupe, you have a son?"

"My son died," said Lupe, fixing me with her gaze.

"But how old are you, then?"

Lupe smiled at me. Her smile was big and pretty. "How old do you think I am?"

I was afraid to guess, and I didn't say anything. María put her arm around Lupe's shoulders. The two of them looked at each other and smiled or winked, I'm not sure which.

"A year younger than María. Eighteen."

"We're both Leos," said María.

"What sign are you?" said Lupe.

"I don't know. I've never paid much attention to that kind of thing, to tell the truth."

"Well, then you're the only person in Mexico who doesn't know his own sign," said Lupe.

"What month were you born, García Madero?" said María.

"January, the sixth of January."

"You're a Capricorn, like Ulises Lima."

"The Ulises Lima?" Lupe said.

I asked her whether she knew him, afraid they would tell me that Ulises Lima went to the dance school too. For a microsecond, I saw myself dancing on tiptoe in an empty gym. But Lupe said she had only heard about him, that María and Ernesto San Epifanio talked about him a lot.

Then Lupe started to talk about her dead son. The baby was four months old when he died. He was born sick, and Lupe had promised the Virgin that she would stop working if her son recovered. She kept her promise for the first three months, and according to her the baby seemed to be getting better. But in the fourth month she had to start working again and he died. She said the Virgin took him away because she didn't keep her word. Lupe was living in a building on Paraguay at the time, near the Plaza de Santa Catarina, and she would leave the baby with an old woman who took care of him at night. One morning, when she got back, they told her that her son was dead. And that was it.

"It isn't your fault," said María. "Don't be superstitious."

"How can it not be my fault? Who broke her promise? Who said that she was going to change her life and didn't?"

"Then why didn't the Virgin kill you instead of your son?"

"The Virgin didn't kill my son," said Lupe. "She took him away, which is a whole different thing. She punished me by leaving me on my own, and she took him away to a better life."

"Oh, well, if that's how you see it, then what's the problem?"

"Of course, that solves everything," I said. "And when did you meet each other, before or after the baby?"

"After," said María, "when this girl here was running wild. Lupe, I think you wanted to die."

"If it hadn't been for Alberto, I would have called it quits," said Lupe with a sigh.

"Alberto is your… boyfriend, I guess," I said. "Do you know him?" I asked María, and she nodded her head yes.

"He's her pimp," said María.

"But he's got a bigger dick than your little friend," said Lupe.

"Are you referring to me?" I said.

María laughed. "Of course she's referring to you, stupid."

I turned red and then I laughed. María and Lupe laughed too.

"How big is Alberto?" said María.

"As big as his knife."

"And how big is his knife?" said María.

"Like this."

"That's ridiculous," I said, although I should have changed the subject. Trying to fix the unfixable, I said: "There aren't any knives that big." I felt worse.

"Ay, mana, how are you so sure about the knife thing?" said María.

"He's had the knife since he was fifteen, a hooker from La Bondojo gave it to him, some girl who died."

"But have you measured his thing with the knife or are you just guessing?"

"A knife that big gets in the way," I persisted.

"He measures it. I don't need to measure it, what do I care? He measures it himself and he measures it all the time, once a day at least, to make sure it hasn't gotten any smaller, he says."

"Is he afraid his weenie will shrink?" said María.

"Alberto isn't afraid of anything. I'm telling you, he's bad."

"Then why the knife? Honestly, I don't understand it," said María. "Plus, hasn't he ever cut himself?"

"A few times, always on purpose. He's good with the knife."

"Are you telling me that your pimp cuts himself on the penis sometimes for fun?" said María.

"That's right."

"I can't believe it."

"It's the truth. Just every once in a while, it's not like he does it every day. Only when he's nervous. Or fucked up. But the measuring thing he does all the time. He's says it's good for his manhood. He says it's a habit he learned inside."

"He sounds like a fucking psychopath," said María.

"You're just too high class, mana. You don't understand. Anyway, what's wrong with it? All these stupid men are always measuring their dicks. Mine does it for real. And with a knife. Also, it's the knife he got from his first girlfriend, who was almost like a mother to him."

"And is it really that big?"

María and Lupe laughed. In my mind, Alberto kept growing and getting tougher the more they talked. I had stopped wanting him to show up, or to risk my life for the girls.

"Once, in Azcapotzalco, there was this blow-job contest in a club, and this one slut always won. No one could get her mouth around all the dicks she could swallow. Then Alberto got up from the table where we were sitting and said wait a minute, I've got some business to take care of. The people who were at our table said that's the way, Alberto, you could tell they knew him. Inside, I was thinking the poor girl was already finished. Alberto stood in the middle of the floor, pulled out his huge dick, stroked it into action, and stuck it in the champion's mouth. She really was tough, and she gave it her best shot. She took it little by little and everyone was gasping in astonishment. Then Alberto grabbed her by the ears and pushed his dick all the way in. No time like the present, he said, and everybody laughed. Even I laughed, although the truth is I felt embarrassed too, and a little bit jealous. For the first few seconds it looked like the girl was going to do it, but then she choked and started to suffocate…"

"Jesus, your Alberto's a monster," I said.

"But keep telling the story, what happened next?" said María.

"Nothing, really. The girl started to hit Alberto, trying to pull away from him, and Alberto started to laugh and say whoah, girl, whoah, like he was riding a bucking bronco, know what I mean?"

"Of course, like he was in a rodeo," I said.

"I didn't like that at all, and I shouted let her go, Alberto, you're going to hurt her. But I don't think he even heard me. Meanwhile the girl's face was turning red, her eyes were wide open (she closed them when she gave head), and she pushed at Alberto's thighs, sort of tugging on his pockets and his belt. Of course, it didn't matter, because each time she tried to pull away from Alberto, he yanked her again by the ears to stop her. And he was going to win, you could tell."

"But why didn't she bite his thing?" said María.

"Because the party was all his friends. If she had, Alberto would have killed her."

"Lupe, you're crazy," said María.

"So are you. Aren't we all?"

María and Lupe laughed. I wanted to hear the end of the story.

"Nothing happened," said Lupe. "The girl couldn't take it anymore and she started to puke."

"And what about Alberto?"

"He pulled out a little before, right? He realized what was coming and he didn't want to get his pants dirty. So he sort of leaped like a tiger, but backward, and he didn't get a drop on himself. The people at the party were clapping like crazy."

"And you're in love with this maniac?" said María.

"In love, like really in love? I don't know. I'm crazy about him, that's for sure. You'd love him too, if you were me."

"Me? Not in a million years."

"He's a real man," said Lupe, looking out the window, her gaze lost in the distance, "and that's the truth. And he understands me better than anyone."

"He exploits you better than anyone, you mean," said María, pushing back and slapping the table with her hands. The blow made the cups jump.

"Come on, mana, don't be that way."

"She's right," I said, "don't be that way. It's her life. Let her do what she wants with it."

"Stay out of this, García Madero. You're looking in from the outside. You don't have a fucking clue what we're talking about."

"You're looking in from the outside too! For Christ's sake, you live with your parents, and you aren't a whore-sorry, Lupe, no offense."

"That's okay," said Lupe, "you couldn't offend me if you tried."

"Shut up, García Madero," said María.

I obeyed her. For a while the three of us were silent. Then María started to talk about the feminist movement, making reference to Gertrude Stein, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Alice B. Toklas (tóclamela, said Lupe, but María ignored her), Unica Zürn, Joyce Man-sour, Marianne Moore, and a bunch of other names I don't remember. The feminists of the twentieth century, I guess. She also mentioned Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

"She's a Mexican poet," I said.

"And a nun too. I know that much," said Lupe.

NOVEMBER 17

Today I went to the Fonts' house without Pancho. (I can't spend all day following Pancho around.) When I got to the gate, though, I started to feel nervous. I worried that María's father would kick me out, that I wouldn't know how to handle him, that he would attack me. I wasn't brave enough to ring the bell, and for a while I walked around the neighborhood thinking about María, Angélica, Lupe, and poetry. Also, without intending to, I ended up thinking about my aunt and uncle, about my life so far. My old life seemed pleasant and empty, and I knew it would never be that way again. That made me deeply glad. Then I headed back quickly toward the Fonts' house and rang the bell. Mr. Font came to the door and made a gesture as if to say hold on a second, I'm on my way. Then he disappeared, leaving the door ajar. After a while he appeared again, crossing the yard and rolling up his sleeves as he walked, a broad smile on his face. He seemed better, actually. He swung open the gate, saying you're García Madero, aren't you? and shook my hand. I said how are you sir, and he said call me Quim, not sir, in this house we don't stand on ceremony. At first I didn't understand what he wanted me to call him and I said Kim? (I've read Rudyard Kipling), but he said no, Quim, short for Joaquín in Catalan.

"Okay then, Quim," I said with a smile of relief, even happiness. "My name is Juan."

"No, I'd better keep calling you García Madero," he said. "That's what everybody calls you."

Then he walked partway through the yard with me (he had taken my arm). Before he let me go, he said that María had told him what happened yesterday.

"I appreciate it, García Madero," he said. "There aren't many young men like you. This country is going to hell, and I don't know how we're going to fix it."

"I just did what anyone would have done," I said, a little tentatively.

"Even the young people, who in theory are our hope for change, are turning into potheads and sluts. There's no way to solve the problem; revolution is the only answer."

"I agree completely, Quim," I said.

"According to my daughter, you behaved like a gentleman."

I shrugged my shoulders.

"A few of her friends-but there's no point getting into it, you'll meet them," he said. "In some ways, it doesn't bother me. A person has to get to know people from all walks of life. At a certain point you need to steep yourself in reality, no? I think it was Alfonso Reyes who said that. Maybe not. It doesn't matter. But sometimes María goes overboard, wouldn't you say? And I'm not criticizing her for that, for steeping herself in reality, but she should steep herself, not expose herself, don't you think? Because if one steeps oneself too thoroughly, one is at risk of becoming a victim. I don't know whether you follow me."

"I follow you," I said.

"A victim of reality, especially if one has friends who are-how to put it-magnetic, wouldn't you say? People who innocently attract trouble or who attract bullies. You're following me, aren't you, García Madero?"

"Of course."

"For example, that Lupe, the girl the two of you saw yesterday. I know her too, believe me, she's been here, at my house, eating here and spending a night or two with us. I don't mean to exaggerate, it was just one or two nights, but that girl has problems, doesn't she? She attracts problems. That's what I meant when I was talking about magnetic people."

"I understand," I said. "Like a magnet."

"Exactly. And in this case, what the magnet is attracting is something bad, very bad, but since María is so young she doesn't realize and she doesn't see the danger, does she, and what she wants is to help. Help those in need. She never thinks about the risks involved. In short, my poor daughter wants her friend, or her acquaintance, to give up the life she's been leading."

"I see what you're getting at, sir-I mean Quim."

"You see what I'm getting at? What am I getting at?"

"You're talking about Lupe's pimp."

"Very good, García Madero. You've put your finger on it: Lupe's pimp. Because what is Lupe to him? His means of support, his occupation, his office; in a word, his job. And what does a worker do when he loses his job? Tell me, what does he do."

"He gets angry?"

"He gets really angry. And who does he get angry at? The person who did him out of a job, of course. No question about it. He doesn't get angry at his neighbor, though then again maybe he does, but the first person he goes after is the person who lost him his job, naturally. And who's sawing away at the floor under him so that he loses his job? My daughter, of course. So who will he get angry at? My daughter. And meanwhile at her family too, because you know what these people are like. Their revenge is horrific and indiscriminate. There are nights, I swear, when I have terrible dreams"-he laughed a little, looking at the grass, as if remembering his dreams-"that would make the strongest man's hair stand on end. Sometimes I dream that I'm in a city that's Mexico City but at the same time it isn't Mexico City, I mean, it's a strange city, but I recognize it from other dreams-I'm not boring you, am I?"

"Hardly!"

"As I was saying, it's a vaguely strange and vaguely familiar city. And I'm wandering endless streets trying to find a hotel or a boardinghouse where they'll take me in. But I can't find anything. All I find is a man pretending to be a deaf-mute. And worst of all is that it's getting late, and I know that when night comes my life won't be worth a thing, will it? I'll be at nature's mercy, as they say. It's a bitch of a dream," he added reflectively.

"Well, Quim, I'm going to see whether the girls are here."

"Of course," he said, not letting go of my arm.

"I'll stop in later on to say goodbye," I said, just to say something.

"I liked what you did last night, García Madero. I liked that you took care of María and you didn't get horny around those prostitutes."

"Jesus, Quim, it was just Lupe… And any friends of María's are friends of mine," I said, flushing to the tips of my ears.

"Well, go see the girls, I think they have another guest. That room is busier than…" He couldn't find the right word and laughed.

I hurried away from him as fast as I could.

When I was about to go into the courtyard, I turned around and Quim Font was still there, laughing quietly to himself and looking at the magnolias.

NOVEMBER 18

Today I went back to the Fonts' house. Quim came to the gate to let me in and gave me a hug. In the little house I found María, Angélica, and Ernesto San Epifanio. The three of them were sitting on Angélica's bed. When I came in they instinctively drew closer together, as if to prevent me from seeing what they were sharing. I think they were expecting Pancho. When they realized it was me, their faces didn't relax.

"You should get in the habit of locking the door," said Angélica. "He almost gave me a heart attack."

Unlike María, Angélica has a very white face, though the underlying skin tone is olive or pink, I'm not sure which, olive, I think, and she's got high cheekbones, a broad forehead, and plumper lips than her sister's. When I saw her, or rather when I saw that she was looking at me (the other times I'd been there she'd never actually looked at me), I felt as if a hand, its fingers long and delicate but very strong, was squeezing my heart. I know Lima and Belano wouldn't approve of that image, but it fits my feelings like a glove.

"I wasn't the last to come in," said María.

"Yes you were." Angélica's voice was assured, almost autocratic, and for a minute I thought that she seemed like the older sister, not the younger one. "Bolt the door and sit down somewhere," she ordered me.

I did as she said. The curtains of the little house were drawn and the light that came in was green, shot through with yellow. I sat in a wooden chair, beside one of the bookcases, and asked them what they were looking at. Ernesto San Epifanio raised his head and scrutinized me for a few seconds.

"Weren't you the one taking notes on the books I was carrying the other day?"

"Yes. Brian Patten, Adrian Henri, and another one I can't remember now."

"The Lost Fire Brigade, by Spike Hawkins."

"Exactly."

"And have you bought them yet?" His tone was mildly sarcastic.

"Not yet, but I plan to."

"You have to go to a bookstore that specializes in English literature. You won't find them in the regular bookstores."

"I know that. Ulises told me about a bookstore where you all go."

"Oh, Ulises Lima," said San Epifanio, stressing the i's. "He'll probably send you to the Librería Baudelaire, where there's lots of French poetry, but not much English poetry… And who exactly are 'you all'?"

" 'You all'?" I said, surprised. The Font sisters kept looking at objects I couldn't see and passing them back and forth. Sometimes they laughed. Angélica's laugh was like a bubbling brook.

"The people who go to bookstores."

"Oh, the visceral realists, of course."

"The visceral realists? Please. The only ones who read are Ulises and his little Chilean friend. The rest are a bunch of functional illiterates. As far as I can tell, the only thing they do in bookstores is steal books."

"But then they read them, don't they?" I said, slightly annoyed.

"No, you're wrong. Then they give the books to Ulises and Belano, who read them and tell what they're about so the others can go around bragging about having read Queneau, for example, when all they've really done is steal a book by Queneau, not read it."

"Belano is Chilean?" I asked, trying to steer the conversation in a different direction, and also because I honestly didn't know.

"Couldn't you tell?" said María without lifting her eyes from whatever it was she was looking at.

"Well, I did notice that he had a slightly different accent, but I thought he might be from Tamaulipas or from Yucatán, I don't know…"

"You thought he was from Yucatán? Oh, García Madero, you poor innocent child. He thought Belano was from Yucatán," San Epifanio said to the Font sisters, and the three of them laughed.

I laughed too.

"He doesn't look like he's from Yucatán," I said, "but he could be. Anyway, I'm not a specialist in Yucatecans."

"Well, he isn't from Yucatán. He's from Chile."

"So how long has he lived in Mexico?" I said to say something.

"Since the Pinochet putsch," said María without lifting her head.

"Since long before the coup," said San Epifanio. "I met him in 1971. What happened was, he went back to Chile and after the coup he came back to Mexico."

"But we didn't know either of you back then," said Angélica.

"Belano and I were very close in those days," said San Epifanio. "We were both eighteen and we were the youngest poets on Calle Bucareli."

"Will you please tell me what you're looking at?" I said.

"Pictures of mine. You might not like them, but you can look at them too if you want."

"Are you a photographer?" I said, getting up and going over to the bed.

"No, I'm just a poet," said San Epifanio, making room for me. "Poetry is more than enough for me, although sooner or later I'm bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories."

"Here." Angélica passed me a little pile of pictures that they had finished with. "You have to look at them in chronological order."

There must have been fifty or sixty photos. All of them were taken with flash. All were of a room, probably a hotel room, except for two, which were of a dimly lit street at night and a red Mustang with a few people in it. The faces of the people in the Mustang were blurry. The rest of the pictures showed a blond, short-haired boy, sixteen or seventeen, although he might only have been fifteen, and a girl maybe two or three years older, and Ernesto San Epifanio. There must have been a fourth person, the one taking the pictures, but he or she was never seen. The first pictures were of the blond boy, dressed, and then with progressively fewer clothes on. In picture number fifteen or so, San Epifanio and the girl showed up. San Epifanio was wearing a purple blazer. The girl had on a fancy party dress.

"Who is he?" I said.

"Be quiet and look at the pictures, then ask," said Angélica.

"He's my love," said San Epifanio.

"Oh. And who's she?"

"His older sister."

By about picture number twenty, the blond boy had begun to dress in his sister's clothes. The girl, who was darker and a little chubby, was making obscene gestures at the unknown person who was photographing them. San Epifanio, meanwhile, remained in control of himself, at least in the first pictures, which showed him smiling but serious, sitting in a leatherette armchair or on the edge of the bed. All of this, however, was only an illusion, because by picture number thirty or thirty-five, San Epifanio had taken off his clothes too (his body, with its long legs and long arms, seemed excessively thin and bony, much thinner than in real life). The next pictures showed San Epifanio kissing the blond boy's neck, his lips, his eyes, his back, his cock at half-mast, his erect cock (a remarkable cock too, for such a delicate-looking boy), under the always vigilant gaze of the sister, who sometimes appeared in full and sometimes in part (an arm and a half, her hand, some fingers, one side of her face), and sometimes just as a shadow on the wall. I have to confess that I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Naturally, no one had warned me that San Epifanio was gay. (Only Lupe, but Lupe also said that I was gay.) So I tried not to show my feelings (which were confused, to say the least) and kept looking. As I feared, the next pictures showed the Brian Patten reader fucking the blond boy. I felt myself turn red and I suddenly realized that I didn't know how I was going to face the Fonts and San Epifanio when I had finished looking through the pictures. The face of the boy being fucked was twisted in a grimace that I assumed was an expression of mingled pain and pleasure. (Or fake emotion, but that only occurred to me later.) San Epifanio's face seemed to sharpen at moments, like an intensely lit razor blade or knife. And every possible expression crossed the watching sister's face, from violent joy to deepest melancholy. The last pictures showed the three of them in bed, in different poses, pretending to sleep or smiling at the photographer.

"Poor kid, it looks like someone was forcing him to be there," I said to annoy San Epifanio.

"Forcing him to be there? It was his idea. He's a little pervert."

"But you love him with all your heart," said Angélica.

"I love him with all my heart, but there are too many things that come between us."

"Like what?" said Angélica.

"Money, for example. I'm poor and he's a spoiled rich kid, used to luxury and travel and having everything he wants."

"Well, he doesn't look rich or spoiled here. Some of these pictures are really brutal," I said in a burst of sincerity.

"His family has lots of money," said San Epifanio.

"Then you could have gone to a nicer hotel. The lighting looks like something from a Santo movie."

"He's the son of the Honduran ambassador," said San Epifanio, shooting me a gloomy look. "But don't tell anybody that," he added, regretting having confessed his secret to me.

I returned the stack of pictures, which San Epifanio put in his pocket. Less than an inch from my left arm was Angélica's bare arm. I gathered up my courage and looked her in the face. She was looking at me too, and I think I blushed a little. I felt happy. Then right away I ruined it.

"Pancho hasn't come today?" I asked, like an idiot.

"Not yet," said Angélica. "What do you think of the pictures?"

"Hard-core," I said.

"Hard-core? That's all?" San Epifanio got up and sat in the wooden chair where I had been. From there he watched me with one of his knife-blade smiles.

"Well, there's a kind of poetry to them. But if I told you that they only struck me as poetic, I'd be lying. They're strange pictures. I'd call them pornographic. Not in a negative sense, but definitely pornographic."

"Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio. "Did the pictures turn you on?"

"No," I said emphatically, although the truth is I wasn't sure. "They didn't turn me on, but they didn't disgust me either."

"Then it isn't pornography. Not for you, at least."

"But I liked them," I admitted.

"Then just say that: you liked them and you don't know why you liked them, which doesn't matter much anyway, period."

"Who's the photographer?" said María.

San Epifanio looked at Angélica and laughed.

"That really is a secret. The person made me swear I wouldn't tell anybody."

"But if it was Billy's idea, who cares who the photographer was?" said Angélica.

So the name of the Honduran ambassador's son was Billy; very appropriate, I thought.

And then, don't ask me why, I got the idea that it was Ulises Lima who had taken the pictures. And next I immediately thought about the interesting (to me) news that Belano was from Chile. And then I watched Angélica. Not in an obvious way, mostly when she wasn't looking at me, her head in a book of poetry (Les Lieux de la douleur, by Eugène Savitzkaya) from which she looked up every now and then to contribute to the conversation that María and San Epifanio were having about erotic art. And all over again I started thinking about the possibility that Ulises Lima had taken the pictures, and I also remembered what I'd heard at Café Quito, that Lima was a drug dealer, and if he was a drug dealer, I thought, then he almost definitely dealt in other things. And that was as far as I'd gotten when Barrios showed up arm in arm with a very nice American girl (she was always smiling) whose name was Barbara Patterson and a poetess I didn't know, called Silvia Moreno, and then we all started to smoke marijuana.

My memory is vague (though not because of the pot, which had practically no effect on me), but later someone brought up the subject of Belano's nationality again-maybe it was me, I don't know-and everybody started to talk about him. More accurately, everyone started to run him down, except María and me, who at some point more or less separated ourselves from the group, physically and spiritually, but even from a distance (maybe because of the pot) I could still hear what they were saying. They were talking about Lima too, about his trips to Guerrero state and Pinochet's Chile to get the marijuana he sold to the writers and painters of Mexico City. But how could Lima go all the way to the other end of the continent to buy marijuana? People were laughing. I think I was laughing too. I think I laughed a lot. I had my eyes closed. They said: Arturo makes Ulises work much harder, it's riskier now, and their words were stamped on my brain. Poor Belano, I thought. Then María took my hand and we left the little house, like when Pancho and Angélica kicked us out, except that this time Pancho wasn't there and no one had kicked us out.

Then I think I slept.

I woke up at three in the morning, stretched out beside Jorgito Font.

I jumped up. Someone had taken off my shoes, my pants, and my shirt. I felt around for them, trying not to wake Jorgito. The first thing I found was my backpack with my books and poems in it, on the floor at the foot of the bed. A little farther away, I found my pants, shirt, and jacket laid out on a chair. I couldn't find my shoes anywhere. I looked for them under the bed and all I found were several pairs of Jorgito's sneakers. I got dressed and thought about whether I should turn on the light or go out with no shoes on. Unable to make up my mind, I went over to the window. When I parted the curtains, I saw that I was on the second floor. I looked out at the dark courtyard and the girls' house, hidden behind some trees and faintly lit by the moon. Before long, I realized that it wasn't the moon that was lighting up the house but a lamp that was on just below my window, slightly to the left, hanging outside the kitchen. The light was very dim. I tried to make out the Fonts' window. I couldn't see anything, just branches and shadows. For a few minutes I weighed the possibility of going back to bed and sleeping until morning, but I came up with several reasons not to. First: I had never slept away from home before without letting my aunt and uncle know; second: I knew I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep; third: I had to see Angélica. Why? I've forgotten, but at the time I felt an urgent need to see her, watch her sleep, curl up at the foot of her bed like a dog or a child (a horrible image, but true). So I slipped toward the door, silently thanking Jorgito for giving me a place to sleep. So long, cuñado! I thought (from the Latin cognatus, cognati: brother-in-law), and steeling myself with the word, I slid catlike out of the room down a hallway as dark as the blackest night, or like a movie theater full of staring eyes, where everything had gone pop, and felt my way along the wall until, after an ordeal too long and nerve-racking to describe in detail (plus I hate details), I found the sturdy staircase that led from the second floor to the first. As I stood there like a statue (i.e., extremely pale and with my hands frozen in a position somewhere between energized and tentative), two alternatives presented themselves to me. Either I could go looking for the living room and the telephone and call my aunt and uncle right away, since by then they had probably already dragged more than one tired policeman out of bed, or I could go looking for the kitchen, which I remembered as being to the left, next to a kind of family dining room. I weighed the pros and cons of each plan and opted for the quieter one, which involved getting out of the Fonts' big house as quickly as possible. My decision was aided in no small part by a sudden image or vision of Quim Font sitting in a wing chair in the dark, enveloped in a cloud of sulfurous reddish smoke. With a great effort I managed to calm myself. Everyone in the house was asleep, although I couldn't hear anyone snoring like at home. Once a few seconds had passed, enough to convince me that no danger was hovering over me, or at least no imminent danger, I set off. In this wing of the house, the glow from the courtyard faintly lit my way and before long I was in the kitchen. There, abandoning my extreme caution, I closed the door, turned on the light, and dropped into a chair, as exhausted as if I'd run a mile uphill. Then I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a tall glass of milk, and made myself a ham and cheese sandwich with oyster sauce and Dijon mustard. When I finished I was still hungry, so I made myself a second sandwich, this time with cheese, lettuce, and pickles bottled with two or three kinds of chilies. This second sandwich didn't fill me up, so I decided to go in search of something more substantial. In a plastic container on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, I found the remains of a chicken mole; in another container I found rice-I guess they were leftovers from that day's dinner-and then I went looking for real bread, not sandwich bread, and I started to make myself dinner. To drink I chose a bottle of strawberry Lulú, which really tastes more like hibiscus. I ate sitting in the kitchen in silence, thinking about the future. I saw tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, fire. Then I washed the frying pan, plate, and silverware, brushed away the crumbs, and unbolted the door to the courtyard. Before I left, I turned out the light.

The girls' house was locked. I knocked once and whispered Angélica's name. No one answered. I looked back, and the shadows in the courtyard and the spout of the fountain rising up like an angry animal kept me from returning to Jorgito Font's room. I knocked again, this time a little harder. Waiting a few seconds, I decided to change tactics. I stepped a few feet to the left and tapped with my fingertips on the cold window-pane. María? I said, Angélica? María, let me in, it's me. Then I was silent, waiting for something to happen, but nobody moved inside the little house. In exasperation, although it would be more accurate to say in exasperated resignation, I dragged myself back to the door and slumped against it, sliding to the ground, staring into nothing. I sensed that I would end up there, asleep at the Font sisters' feet one way or another, like a dog (a wet dog in the inclement night!), just as I had foolishly and intrepidly wished a few hours ago. I could have burst into tears. To clear away the clouds on my immediate horizons, I started to go over all the books I should read, all the poems I should write. Then it occurred to me that if I fell asleep, the Fonts' servant would probably find me there and wake me, saving me from the embarrassment of being found by Mrs. Font or one of her daughters or Quim Font himself. Although if it was the latter who found me, I argued hopefully, he would probably think that I'd sacrificed a night of peaceful slumbers to keep faithful watch over his daughters. If they wake me up and ask me in for a cup of coffee, I concluded, nothing will be lost; if they kick me awake and throw me out without further ado, there'll be no hope left for me. Besides, how will I explain to my uncle that I crossed the whole city barefoot? I think it was this line of reasoning that roused me, or maybe it was desperation that made me unconsciously pound the door with the back of my head. In any case, I suddenly heard steps inside the little house. A few seconds later, the door opened and a voice asked me in a sleepy whisper what I was doing there.

It was María.

"My shoes are gone. If I could find them, I'd go home right now," I said.

"Come in," said María. "Don't make a sound."

I followed her with my arms outstretched, like a blind man. All at once I ran into something. It was María's bed. I heard her order me to get in, then I watched her retrace her steps (the girls' house is actually pretty big) and silently close the door, which had been left ajar. I didn't hear her return. The darkness was total now, although after a few seconds-I was sitting on the edge of the bed, not lying down as she had commanded-I could make out the outline of the window through the enormous linen drapes. Then I felt someone get into bed and lie down, and then, how much later I don't know, I felt that person just barely sit up, probably leaning on an elbow, and pull me close. By the feel of her breath I realized that I was only fractions of an inch from María's face. Her fingers ran over my face, from my chin to my eyes, closing my eyes as if inviting me to sleep; her hand, a bony hand, unzipped my pants and felt for my cock. Why I don't know, maybe because I was so nervous, but I said I wasn't sleepy. I know, said María, me neither. Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked. I explored María's naked body, María's glorious naked body, in a contained silence, although I could have shouted, rejoicing in each corner, each smooth and interminable space I discovered. María was less reserved. Soon she began to moan, and her maneuvers, at first timid or restrained, became more open (I can't think of another word for it just now), as she guided my hand to places it hadn't reached, whether out of ignorance or negligence. So that was how I learned, in fewer than ten minutes, where a woman's clitoris is and how to massage or fondle or press it, always within the bounds of gentleness, of course, bounds that María, on the other hand, was constantly transgressing, since my cock, treated well in the first forays, soon began to suffer torments in her hands, hands that in the dark and the tangle of the sheets sometimes seemed to me like the talons of a falcon or a falconess, tugging on me so hard that I was afraid they were trying to pull me right off, and at other times like Chinese dwarfs (her fingers were the fucking dwarfs!) investigating and measuring the spaces and ducts that connected my testicles to my cock and each other. Then (but first I had pushed my pants down to my knees) I got on top of her and entered her.

"Don't come inside of me," said María.

"I'll try not to," I said.

"What do you mean you'll try, you jerk? Don't come inside!"

I looked to either side of the bed as María's legs laced and unlaced across my back (I would've been happy to keep going like that until I died). In the distance I glimpsed the shadow of Angélica's bed and the curve of Angélica's hips, like an island observed from another island. Suddenly I felt María's lips sucking my left nipple, almost as if she were biting my heart. I jumped, and pushed in all the way in one thrust, wanting to pin her to the bed (the springs of which began to squeak hideously so that I paused), while at the same time I kissed her hair and forehead with great delicacy and still managed to find the time to wonder how it was possible that the noise we were making hadn't woken Angélica. I didn't even notice when I came. Of course, I pulled out in time; I've always had good reflexes.

"You didn't come inside, did you?" said María.

I swore into her ear that I hadn't. For a few seconds we were busy breathing. I asked her whether she'd had an orgasm and her answer was perplexing:

"I came twice, García Madero, didn't you notice?" she asked in utter seriousness.

I was honest and told her no, I hadn't noticed anything.

"You're still hard," said María.

"I guess I am," I said. "Can we do it again?"

"All right," she said.

I don't know how much time went by. I pulled out and came again. This time I couldn't keep from crying out.

"Now do me," said María.

"You didn't have an orgasm?"

"No, not this time, but it was good." She took my hand, selected my index finger, and guided it around her clitoris. "Kiss my nipples. You can bite them too, but very gently at first," she said. "Then bite them a little harder. And put your hand around my neck. Stroke my face. Put your fingers in my mouth."

"Wouldn't you rather that I… suck your clitoris?" I said, vainly trying to find an elegant way to put it.

"No, not right now, your finger is enough. But kiss my tits."

"You have gorgeous breasts." I was unable to repeat the word tits.

I got undressed without getting out from under the sheets (suddenly I had begun to sweat) and immediately began to carry out María's instructions. First her sighs and then her moans got me hard again. She noticed and with one hand she stroked my cock until she couldn't anymore.

"What's wrong, María?" I whispered in her ear, afraid that I'd hurt her throat (squeeze, she kept whispering, squeeze) or bitten one of her nipples too hard.

"Keep going, García Madero," said María, smiling in the dark, and she kissed me.

When we were done she told me that she had come more than five times. To be honest, I had a hard time accepting that such an outrageous thing was possible, but when she gave me her word I had to believe her.

"What are you thinking about?" said María.

"About you," I lied; actually, I was thinking about my uncle and the law school and the magazine that Belano and Lima were going to publish. "What about you?"

"I'm thinking about the pictures," she said.

"What pictures?"

"Ernesto's."

"The pornographic pictures?"

"Yes."

The two of us shuddered in unison. Our faces were glued together. We could talk, vocalize, thanks to the space made by our noses, but even so I could feel her lips move against mine.

"Do you want to do it again?"

"Yes," said María.

"Well," I said, a little queasy, "if you change your mind at the last minute, let me know."

"Change my mind about what?" said María.

The insides of her thighs were drenched in my semen. I felt cold and I couldn't help sighing deeply at the moment I penetrated her again.

María whimpered and I started to move with increasing enthusiasm.

"Try not to make too much noise, I don't want Angélica to hear us."

"You try not to make noise," I said, and I added: "What did you give Angélica to make her sleep like that?"

The two of us laughed quietly, me against her neck and her burying her face in the pillows. When I finished, I didn't even have the energy to ask her if she'd enjoyed herself, and the only thing I wanted was to gradually drift off to sleep with María in my arms. But she got up and made me get dressed and follow her to the bathroom in the big house. When we went out into the courtyard I realized that the sun was already coming up. For the first time that night I could see my lover a little more clearly. María was wearing a white nightgown with red embroidery on the sleeves, and her hair was pulled back with a ribbon or a piece of braided leather.

After we dried ourselves I thought about calling home, but María said that my aunt and uncle would surely be asleep and I could do it later.

"And now what?" I said.

"Now let's sleep a little," said María, putting her arm around my waist.

But the night or day held a last surprise for me. Huddled in a corner of the little house, I discovered Barrios and his American friend. The two of them were snoring. I would've liked to wake them with a kiss.

NOVEMBER 19

We all had breakfast together: Quim Font, Mrs. Font, María and Angélica, Jorgito Font, Barrios, Barbara Patterson, and me. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, slices of fried ham, bread, mango jam, strawberry jam, butter, salmon pâté, and coffee. Jorgito drank a glass of milk. Mrs. Font (she kissed me on the cheek when she saw me!) made something that she called crèpes but that were nothing like crèpes. The rest of breakfast was prepared by the servant (whose name I don't know or can't remember, which is inexcusable). Barrios and I washed the dishes.

Afterward, when Quim went off to work and Mrs. Font began to plan her day (she works, so she told me, as a writer for a new Mexican family magazine), I finally decided to call home. My aunt Martita was the only one there, and when she heard my voice she started to scream like a crazy woman, then cry. After an uninterrupted series of prayers to the Virgin, appeals to duty, fragmented accounts of the night I had "put my uncle through," warnings in a tone more complicitous than recriminatory about the impending punishment that my uncle was surely pondering that very morning, I finally broke in and assured her that I was fine, that I'd spent the night with some friends and I wouldn't be home until "after dark" since I planned to head straight for the university. My aunt promised that she would call my uncle at work herself, and she made me swear that as long as I lived I would call home when I decided to spend the night out. For a few seconds I considered whether it might be a good idea to call my uncle myself, but in the end I decided that it wasn't necessary.

I fell into an armchair with no idea what to do. I had the rest of the morning and day at my disposal, which is to say, I was conscious that they were at my disposal and in that sense they struck me as different from other mornings and other days (when I was a lost soul, wandering around the university or in the grips of my virginity), but here at the first sign of change I didn't know what to do. I had so many possibilities to choose from.

The consumption of food-I ate like a wolf while Mrs. Font and Barbara Patterson talked about museums and Mexican families-had made me slightly sleepy and at the same time had reawakened my desire to have sex with María (whom I had avoided looking at during breakfast, trying when I did to adapt my gaze to the notions of brotherly love or disinterested camaraderie that I imagined were harbored by her father, who incidentally didn't seem the least bit surprised to see me at his table at such an early hour), but María was getting ready to go out, Angélica was getting ready to go out, Jorgito Font had already left, Barbara Patterson was in the shower, and only Barrios and the maid were wandering around the big library of the main house like the last survivors of a terrible shipwreck, so to stay out of their way and in a faint desire for symmetry, I crossed the courtyard for the millionth time and made myself comfortable in the sisters' little house, where the beds were still unmade (which was a clear sign that it was the maid or servant or cleaning lady-or the naca of steel, as Jorgito called her-who did the work, a detail that increased my attraction to María rather than lessening it, tainting her pleasantly with frivolousness and indifference), contemplating the still-damp scene of my gateway to glory, and even though I ought to have wept or prayed, what I did was lie down on one of the unmade beds (Angélica's, as I found out later, not María's) and fall asleep.

I was woken by Pancho Rodríguez hitting me (I think he may have been kicking me too, though I'm not sure). Only good manners prevented me from greeting him with a punch in the jaw. After saying good morning I went out into the courtyard and washed my face in the fountain (proof that I was still asleep), with Pancho behind me muttering unintelligibly.

"There's no one home," he said. "I had to hop the wall to get in. What are you doing here?"

I told him that I had spent the night there (I played it down, since I didn't like the way Pancho's nostrils were quivering, by adding that Barrios and Barbara Patterson had spent the night too), then we tried to get into the big house by the back door, the kitchen door, and the front door, but they were all locked tight.

"If a neighbor sees us and calls the police," I said, "how will we explain that we're not breaking in?"

"I don't give a shit. Sometimes I like to nose around my girlfriends' houses," said Pancho.

"And also," I said, ignoring Pancho's remark, "I think I saw a curtain move in the house next door. If the police come…"

"Did you have sex with Angélica, asshole?" asked Pancho suddenly, turning his eyes away from the front windows of the Fonts' house.

"Of course not," I assured him.

I don't know whether he believed me or not. But the two of us hopped the wall again and beat a retreat from Colonia Condesa.

As we walked (in silence, through the Parque España, down Parras, through the Parque San Martín, and along Teotihuacán, where the only people out at that time of day were housewives, maids, and bums), I thought about what María had said about love and about the suffering that love would bring down on Pancho's head. By the time we got to Insurgentes, Pancho was in a better mood, talking about literature and recommending authors to me, trying to forget about Angélica. Then we headed down Manzanillo, turned onto Aguascalientes, and turned south again onto Medellín, walking until we reached Calle Tepeji. We stopped in front of a five-story building and Pancho invited me to have lunch with his family.

We took the elevator up to the top floor.

There, instead of going into one of the apartments, as I had expected, we climbed the stairs to the roof. A gray sky, but bright as if there had been a nuclear attack, welcomed us in the middle of a vibrant profusion of flowerpots and plants spilling into the passageways and laundry space.

Pancho's family lived in two rooms on the roof.

"Temporarily," explained Pancho, "until we save enough for a house around here."

I was formally introduced to his mother, Doña Panchita; his brother Moctezuma, nineteen, Catullian poet and union organizer; and his younger brother Norberto, fifteen, high school student.

One room served as dining and TV room during the day, and as Pancho, Moctezuma, and Norberto's bedroom at night. The other was a kind of giant closet or wardrobe, which held the refrigerator, the kitchen supplies (they brought the portable stove out into the hallway during the day and put it back in the room at night), and the mattress where Doña Panchita slept.

As we were starting to eat, we were joined by a guy called Luscious Skin, twenty-three, rooftop neighbor, who was introduced as a visceral realist poet. A little before I left (many hours later; the time passed in a flash), I asked him again what his name was and he said Luscious Skin so naturally and confidently (much more naturally and confidently than I would've said Juan García Madero) that for a minute I actually believed that somewhere amid the back alley and swamps of our Mexican Republic there was actually a family named Skin.

After lunch, Doña Panchita sat down to watch her favorite soap operas and Norberto began to study, his books spread out on the table. Pancho and Moctezuma washed the dishes in a sink from which there was a view of lots of the Parque de las Américas, and behind it the threatening hulks-looking as if they'd dropped from another planet, and an unlikely planet too-of the Medical Center, the Children's Hospital, the General Hospital.

"The good thing about living here, if you don't mind the close quarters," said Pancho, "is that you're close to everything, right in the heart of Mexico City."

Luscious Skin (called Skin, of course, by Pancho and his brother-and even Doña Panchita!) invited us to his room, where, he said, he had some marijuana left over from the last big party.

"No time like the present," said Moctezuma.

Unlike the two rooms occupied by the Rodríguezes, Luscious Skin's room was a model of bare austerity. I didn't see clothes strewn around, I didn't see household things, I didn't see books (Pancho and Moctezuma were poor, but where they lived I'd seen books in the most unexpected places, by Efraín Huerta, Augusto Monterroso, Julio Torri, Alfonso Reyes, the aforementioned Catullus in a translation by Ernesto Cardenal, Jaime Sabines, Max Aub, Andrés Henestrosa), just a thin mattress and a chair-no table-and a nice leather suitcase where he kept his clothes.

Luscious Skin lived alone, although from remarks that he and the Rodríguez brothers made, I gathered that not long ago a woman (and her son), both pretty tough, had lived there and taken off with most of the furniture when they left.

For a while we smoked marijuana and surveyed the landscape (which, as I've said, basically consisted of the silhouettes of the hospitals, endless rooftops like the one we were on, and a sky of low clouds moving swiftly toward the south), and then Pancho started to tell the story of his adventures that morning at the Fonts' house and his meeting with me.

I was questioned about what had happened, this time by all three of them, but they didn't manage to get anything out of me that I hadn't already told Pancho. At some point they started to talk about María. From what I could gather, it seemed as though Luscious Skin and María had been lovers. And that Luscious Skin was banned from the Fonts' house. I wanted to know why. They explained to me that Mrs. Font had walked in on Luscious Skin and María one night as they were screwing in the little house. There was a party going on in the big house, in honor of a Spanish writer who had just come to Mexico, and at a certain point during the party, Mrs. Font wanted to introduce her older daughter-María, that is-to the writer and couldn't find her. So she went looking for her, arm in arm with the Spanish writer. When they got to the little house it was dark and from inside they could hear a noise like blows: loud, rhythmic blows. Mrs. Font surely wasn't thinking (if she'd thought first, said Moctezuma, she would've taken the Spaniard back to the party and come back alone to see what was going on in her daughter's room), but as it was, she didn't think, and she turned on the light. There, to her horror, was María, at the other end of the little house, dressed only in a shirt, her pants down, sucking Luscious Skin's dick as he slapped her on the ass and the cunt.

"Really hard slaps," said Luscious Skin. "When they turned on the light I saw her ass and it was all red. I actually got scared."

"But why were you hitting her?" I said angrily, afraid I would blush.

"Isn't he an innocent. Because she asked for it," said Pancho.

"I find that hard to believe," I said.

"Stranger things have happened," said Luscious Skin.

"It's all because of that French girl Simone Darrieux," said Moctezuma. "I know for a fact that María and Angélica invited her to a feminist meeting and afterward they talked about sex."

"Who is this Simone?" I asked.

"A friend of Arturo Belano's."

"I went up to them. I was like, how's it going, girls, and the little sluts were talking about the Marquis de Sade," said Moctezuma.

The rest of the story was predictable. María's mother tried to say something, but nothing came out of her mouth. The Spaniard, who, according to Luscious Skin, turned visibly pale at the sight of María's raised and proffered backside, took Mrs. Font's arm with the solicitude reserved for the mentally ill and dragged her back to the party. In the sudden silence that fell over the little house, Luscious Skin could hear them talking in the courtyard, exchanging hurried words, as if the horny Spanish bastard were proposing something unsavory to poor Mrs. Font as she leaned there on the fountain. But then he heard their footsteps fade away in the direction of the big house and María said that they should keep going.

"That I really can't believe," I said.

"I swear on my mother," said Luscious Skin.

"After you were interrupted, María wanted to keep making love?"

"That's how she is," said Moctezuma.

"And how would you know?" I said, getting more worked up by the second.

"I've fucked her too," said Moctezuma. "She's the wildest girl in Mexico City, although I've never hit her, that's for sure; I don't like that weird stuff. But I know for a fact that she does."

"I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that María was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and she wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin.

"That's very María," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously."

"And did you keep fucking?" I asked. Or whispered, or howled, I can't remember, although I do remember that I took several long drags on the joint and that they had to ask me several times to pass it on, that it wasn't just for me.

"Yeah, we kept fucking, or anyway she kept sucking my dick and I kept slapping her but less and less hard, and somehow I wasn't so into it anymore. I think her mother showing up had gotten to me, even if it hadn't gotten to her, and it was like I didn't feel like fucking anymore, like I'd cooled off and now I just wanted to get out and maybe see what was going on at the party, I think some of the famous poets were there, the Spanish writer, Ana María Díaz and Mr. Díaz, Laura Damián's parents, the poets Álamo, Labarca, Berrocal, Artemio Sánchez, the actress América Lagos from TV, and also I was a little afraid that María's mother would show up again, but this time with the fucking architect and then I was really going to get it."

"Laura Damián's parents were there?" I asked.

"The casta diva's parents themselves," said Luscious Skin, "and other celebrities. Believe me, I notice these things. I'd seen them before through the window and said hello to Berrocal, the poet. I'd been to his workshop a few times, but I don't know whether he remembered me or what. I think I was hungry too, and just imagining the things they were eating in the other house was making me drool. I wouldn't have minded showing up there, with María of course, and digging in. I felt really beat, it must have been the blow job. But I honestly wasn't thinking about the blow job, you know? I wasn't thinking about María's lips, or her tongue wrapping around my dick, or her saliva, which by that point was trickling down the hair on my balls…"

"Spare us," said Pancho.

"Cut the crap," said his brother.

"Make it snappy," I said so as not to be left out, although the truth was I felt completely drained.

"Well, so I told her. I said: María, let's do this next time or some other night. We usually fucked here, at my place, where we could take our time, although she never stayed all night, she always left at four or five in the morning, and it was a pain in the ass because I always offered to take her home. I couldn't let her go by herself at that hour. And she said keep going, don't stop, it's all right. And I thought she meant that I should keep slapping her ass. What would you have thought she meant? (The same thing, said Pancho.) So I started hitting her again, well, hitting her with one hand and stroking her clitoris and her tits with the other. Really, the sooner we finished, the better. I was ready. But of course, I wasn't going to come before she came. And the slut was taking forever and that started to make me mad, so I was hitting her harder and harder. Her butt, her legs, but also her cunt. Have you ever done it that way, boys? Well, I recommend it. At first the sound, the sound of the slaps, kind of doesn't seem right, it throws you off. It's like something raw in a dish where everything else is cooked. But then it kind of meshes with what you're doing, and the girl's moans, María's moans, mesh with it too, each time you hit her she moans, and the moans keep getting louder, and a moment comes when you feel her ass burning, and the palms of your hands are burning too, and your cock starts to beat like a heart, plunk plunk plunk…"

"You're laying it on thick, mano," said Moctezuma.

"I swear it's the truth. She had my cock in her mouth, but not gripping it tight, not sucking it, just teasing it with the tip of her tongue. She had it like a gun in a holster. See the difference? Not like a gun in the hand, but a gun in a sheath, under the arm or slung around the waist, if that makes sense. And she was throbbing too, her butt was throbbing and so were her legs and the lips of her vagina and her clitoris. I know because each time after I hit her I would stroke her, I felt her there and I noticed, and that really turned me on and I had to make an effort not to come. And she was moaning, but when I hit her she moaned more. When I wasn't hitting her she moaned a lot (I couldn't see her face), but when I was hitting her it was much more extreme, the moaning, I mean, like her heart was breaking, and what I wanted was to turn her over and screw her, but there was no way, she would've gotten mad. That's the problem with María. Things are intense with her but you always have to do it her way."

"And what happened next?" I said.

"Well, she came and I came, and that was it."

"That was it?" said Moctezuma.

"That was it, I swear. We cleaned ourselves up-well, I cleaned myself up, combed my hair a little, and she put on her pants, and we went out to see what was going on at the party. Then we got separated. That was my mistake. Letting myself get separated from her. I started to talk to Berrocal, who was alone in a corner. Then the poet Artemio Sánchez came over with some girl about thirty who was supposedly the deputy editor at El Guajolote and right there I started asking her whether she needed poems or stories or philosophical pieces for the magazine, I told her that I had lots of unpublished material, I talked to her about my buddy Moctezuma's translations, and as I talked I was looking for the hors d'oeuvre table out of the corner of my eye because all of a sudden I was fucking hungry, and then I saw María's mother show up again, followed by her father, with the famous Spanish poet a few steps behind, and that was the end of that: they threw me out and warned me never to set foot in their house again."

"And María didn't do anything?"

"No, she didn't. Nothing. At first I acted like I didn't understand what they were talking about, you know, like none of this had anything to do with me, but then, mano, there was no point pretending anymore. It became clear that they were going to boot me out like a fucking dog. I was sorry that they did it in front of Berrocal. Why not be honest, the bastard was probably laughing to himself as I backed away toward the door. I can't believe there was a time I actually sort of admired him."

"You admired Berrocal? You really are a dumbshit," said Pancho.

"The truth is that in the beginning he was nice to me. You don't know what it's like, you're from Mexico City, you grew up here, but I came here not knowing anyone and without a fucking peso. That was three years ago, when I was twenty-one. It was one hurdle after another. And Berrocal helped me out, let me into his workshop, introduced me to people who could hook me up with a job; I met María in his workshop. My life has been like a bolero," said Luscious Skin suddenly, in a dreamy voice.

"Well, go on: Berrocal was looking at you and laughing," I said.

"No, he wasn't laughing, but I thought he was laughing to himself. And Artemio Sánchez was looking at me too, but he was so bombed he didn't even know what was going on. And the deputy editor of El Guajolote, I think she was the most horrified, as well she should have been because the look on María's mother's face was enough to give you the chills. I swear I thought she might have a weapon on her. And despite it all I was backing out in slow motion, and that was because I still hoped that María would show up, that María would push through the guests and between her parents and grab me by the arm or sling her arm over my shoulders-María is the only woman I know who puts her arm around men's shoulders instead of their waists-and get me out of there with some decorum, I mean go with me."

"So did she come over?"

"Come over? No, at least not in the sense you mean. I did see her. Her head popped up for a second over the heads and shoulders of a bunch of assholes."

"And what did she do?"

"She didn't do a goddamn thing."

"Maybe she didn't see you," said Moctezuma.

"Of course she saw me. She looked me in the eye, but the way she does. You know how it is, sometimes she looks at you and it's like she doesn't see you or she's looking right through you. And then she disappeared. So I said to myself you lost this one, amigo. Go quietly and don't make a scene. And I started to move for real, and as I was backing away María's bitch of a mother lunges at me, and I thought the woman was going to kick me in the balls or slap me at least. All right, then, I thought, so much for the orderly retreat, I'd better run, but by then the bitch was on top of me like she was going to kiss me or bite me, and guess what she says to me…"

The Rodríguez brothers were silent. No doubt they already knew.

"Did she insult you?" I asked hesitantly.

"She said: shame on you, shame on you. That's all, but she said it ten times at least, and an inch away from my face."

"It's hard to believe that witch gave birth to María and Angélica," said Moctezuma.

"Stranger things have happened," said Pancho.

"Are you still her lover?" I said.

Luscious Skin heard me but didn't answer.

"How often have you had sex with her?" I said.

"I don't even remember," said Luscious Skin.

"What's with the questions?" said Pancho.

"I don't know, just curious," I said.

It was late that night when I left the Rodríguez brothers' house (I had lunch and dinner with them and I could probably even have spent the night, they were so generous). When I got to the bus stop on Insurgentes, I suddenly realized that I didn't feel strong enough or in the mood for the long, involved discussion waiting for me at home.

One by one, the buses that I should have taken kept going by, until at last I got up from the curb where I'd been sitting and thinking and watching the traffic (or rather, watching the headlights of the cars shining in my face) and set out for the Fonts'.

Before I got there I called. Jorgito answered. I told him to get his sister. In a few seconds, María came to the phone. I wanted to see her. She asked me where I was. I told her I was near her house, at Plaza Popocatépetl.

"Wait for a few hours," she said, "and then come. Don't ring the bell. Come over the wall and sneak in as quietly as you can. I'll be waiting for you." I sighed deeply and almost told her that I loved her (but didn't say it), and then hung up. Since I didn't have the money to go to a coffee shop, I stayed in the plaza, sitting on a bench, writing in my diary and reading a book of Tablada's poems that Pancho had loaned me. When two hours exactly had passed, I got up and set out for Calle Colima.

I looked both ways before I jumped, hauling myself up onto the wall. I dropped down, trying not to crush the flowers that Mrs. Font (or the maid) had planted on that side of the garden. Then I walked in the dark toward the little house.

María was waiting for me under a tree. Before I could say anything, she kissed me on the mouth, sticking her tongue down my throat. She tasted of cigarettes and expensive food. I tasted of cigarettes and cheap food. But both kinds of food were good. All the fear and sadness that I felt instantly melted away. Instead of going to her little house we started to make love right there, standing up under the tree. So that no one would hear the sounds she made, María bit my neck. I pulled out before I came (María said ahhhh: maybe I pulled out too quickly) and I guess I came on the grass and the flowers. In the little house Angélica was sound asleep, or pretending to be sound asleep, and we made love again. And then I got up, my whole body aching, and I knew that if I told her I loved her the pain would go away instantly, but I didn't say anything and I checked in every corner, to see whether I would find Barrios and the Patterson girl sleeping in one of them, but there was no one there except for the Font sisters and me.

Then we started to talk, and Angélica woke up and we turned on the light and the three of us talked until late. We talked about poetry, about the dead poet Laura Damián and the prize named after her, about the magazine that Ulises Lima and Belano planned to publish, about Ernesto San Epifanio's life, about what Huracán Ramírez must look like with his mask off, outside the ring, about a painter friend of Angélica's who lived in Tepito, and about María's friends from the dance school. And after lots of talk and many cigarettes, Angélica and María fell asleep and I turned out the light and got into bed and made love to María again in my mind.

NOVEMBER 20

Political affiliations: Moctezuma Rodríguez is a Trotskyite. Jacinto Requena and Arturo Belano used to be Trotskyites.

María Font, Angélica Font, and Laura Jáuregui (Belano's ex-girlfriend) used to belong to a radical feminist movement called Mexican Women on the Warpath. That's where they supposedly met Simone Darrieux, friend of Belano and promoter of some kind of sadomasochism.

Ernesto San Epifanio started the first Homosexual Communist Party of Mexico and the first Mexican Homosexual Proletarian Commune.

Ulises Lima and Laura Damián once planned to start an anarchist group: the draft of a founding manifesto still exists. Before that, at the age of fifteen, Ulises Lima tried to join what remained of Lucio Cabañas's guerrilla group.

Quim Font's father, also called Quim Font, was born in Barcelona and died in the Battle of the Ebro.

Rafael Barrios's father was active in the illegal railroad workers' union. He died of cirrhosis.

Luscious Skin's father and mother were born in Oaxaca and, according to Luscious Skin himself, they starved to death.

NOVEMBER 21

Party at Catalina O'Hara's house.

This morning I talked to my uncle on the phone. He asked me when I planned to come back. Always, I said. After an awkward silence (he probably didn't understand my answer but didn't want to admit it), he asked me what I'd gotten myself mixed up in. Nothing, I said. Tonight I want to see you home where you belong, he said. Or else. Behind him I could hear my aunt Martita crying. Of course, I said. Ask him if he's on drugs, my aunt said, but my uncle said he can hear you and then he asked me whether I had money. I've got bus fare, I said, and then I couldn't talk anymore.

Actually, I didn't even have bus fare. But then things took an unexpected turn.

At Catalina O'Hara's house were Ulises Lima, Belano, Müller, San Epifanio, Barrios, Barbara Patterson, Requena and his girlfriend Xóchitl, the Rodríguez brothers, Luscious Skin, the woman painter who shared the studio with Catalina, plus lots of other people I didn't know and hadn't heard of, who came and went like a dark river.

When María, Angélica, and I made our entrance, the door was open. As we came in the only people we saw were the Rodríguez brothers, sitting on the stairs to the second floor sharing a joint. We said hello and sat down next to them. I think they were waiting for us. Then Pancho and Angélica went upstairs and we were left alone. From above came spooky music that was supposed to be soothing, full of the sounds of birds, ducks, frogs, wind, the sea, and even people's footsteps on the earth or dry grass, but the general effect was terrifying, like the sound track for a horror movie. Then Luscious Skin came in, kissed María on the cheek (I looked the other way, at a wall covered in prints of women or women's dreams), and started to talk to us. Why I don't know, maybe because I was shy, but while they talked (Luscious Skin was a regular at the dance school; he spoke María's language), I gradually tuned out, turning inward, and started to think about all the strange things I had experienced that morning at the Fonts'.

At first everything went smoothly. I sat down to breakfast with the family. Mrs. Font greeted me with a pleasant good morning. Jorgito didn't even glance at me (he was half asleep). The maid, when she arrived, waved in a friendly way. So far so good, and in fact for a moment I even thought I might be able to live in María's little house for the rest of my life. But then Quim appeared, and just the sight of him gave me the shivers. He looked as if he hadn't slept all night, as if he'd just emerged from a torture chamber or an executioners' den, his hair was a mess, his eyes were red, he hadn't shaved (or showered), and the backs of his hands were spotted with something that looked like iodine, his fingers stained with ink. Of course, he didn't greet me, although I said good morning to him as warmly as I could. His wife and daughters ignored him. After a few minutes, I ignored him too. His breakfast was much more frugal than ours: he swallowed two cups of black coffee and then he smoked a wrinkled cigarette that he pulled from his pocket instead of a pack, watching us in the strangest way, as if he were defying us but at the same time didn't see us. Finished with breakfast, he got up and asked me to follow him, saying that he wanted to have a word with me.

I looked at María, I looked at Angélica, and since nothing in their faces told me to say no, I followed.

It was the first time I had been in Quim Font's study, and I was surprised by the size of the room, which was much smaller than any of the other rooms in the house. There were photographs and plans tacked to the walls or scattered around any which way on the floor. A drafting table and a stool were the only furniture and they took up more than half the space. The study smelled like tobacco and sweat.

"I've been working all night," said Quim. "I couldn't sleep a wink."

"Oh, really?" I said, thinking that now I was in for it, that Quim must have heard me come by the night before, that he had seen María and me through the study's one little window, and now I was going to get it.

"Yes, look at my hands," he said.

He held his two hands at chest height. They were trembling considerably.

"On a project?" I said affably, looking at the papers spread out on the table.

"No," said Quim, "on a magazine. A magazine that's coming out soon."

I don't know why, but I immediately thought (or knew, as if he had told me so himself) that he meant the visceral realist magazine.

"I'm going to show them, everyone who's against me, yes, sir," he said.

I went over to the table and studied the diagrams and drawings, leafing slowly through the rough stack of papers. The mock-up for the magazine was a chaos of geometric figures and randomly scribbled names or letters. It was obvious that poor Mr. Font was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

"What do you think?"

"Extremely interesting," I said.

"Those jackasses will learn what the avant-garde is now, won't they? And that's even without the poems, see? This is where all of your poems will go."

The space he showed me was full of lines, lines mimicking writing, but also little drawings, like when someone swears in the comics: snakes, bombs, knives, skulls, crossbones, little mushroom clouds. The rest of each page was a compendium of Quim Font's extravagant ideas about graphic design.

"Look, this is the magazine's logo."

A snake (which might have been smiling but more likely was writhing in a spasm of pain) was biting its tail with a hungry, agonized expression, its eyes fixed like daggers on the hypothetical reader.

"But nobody knows what the magazine will be called yet," I said.

"It doesn't matter. The snake is Mexican and it also symbolizes circularity. Have you read Nietzsche, García Madero?" he said suddenly.

I confessed apologetically that I hadn't. Then I looked at each of the pages of the magazine (there were more than sixty), and just as I was getting ready to leave, Quim asked how things were going between me and his daughter. I told him that things were fine, that María and I were getting along better and better every day, and then I decided to shut my mouth.

"Life is hard for parents," he said, "especially in Mexico City. How long has it been since you slept at home?"

"Three nights," I said.

"And isn't your mother worried?"

"I talked to them on the phone. They know I'm all right."

Quim looked me up and down.

"You're not in great shape, my boy."

I shrugged my shoulders. The two of us stood there pensively for a minute without saying anything, him drumming his fingers on the table and me looking at old plans tacked to the walls, plans for dream houses that Quim would probably never see built.

"Come with me," he said.

I followed him to his room on the second floor, which was about five times the size of his study.

He opened the closet and took out a green sports shirt.

"Try this on, see how it fits."

I hesitated for a second, but Quim's gestures were abrupt, as if there were no time to lose. I dropped my shirt at the foot of the bed, an enormous bed where Quim, his wife, and his three children could've slept, and I put on the green shirt. It fit me well.

"It's yours," said Quim. Then he stuck his hand in his pocket and handed me some bills: "So you can treat María to a soda."

His hand was trembling, his outstretched arm was trembling, his other arm, which was hanging at his side, was trembling too, and his face was twisting into horrible expressions that forced me to look anywhere but at him. I thanked him but said there was no way I could accept such a gift.

"Strange," said Quim, "everybody takes my money: my daughters, my son, my wife, my employees"-he used the plural, although I knew perfectly well that at this point he didn't have any employees, except for the maid, but he didn't mean the maid-"even my bosses love my money and that's why they keep it."

"Thank you very much," I said.

"Take it and put it in your pocket, damn it!"

I took the money and put it away. It was quite a bit, though I didn't have the nerve to count it.

"I'll return it as soon as I can," I said.

Quim let himself fall backward on the bed. His body made a muffled sound and then quivered. For a second I wondered whether it could be a water bed.

"Don't worry, boy. We were put on this earth to help each other. You help me with my daughter, I'll help you with a little cash for your expenses. Call it an extra allowance, all right?"

His voice sounded tired, as if he were about to collapse in exhaustion and sleep, but his eyes were still open, staring nervously at the ceiling.

"I like the way the magazine looks, I'll give those bastards something to talk about," he said, but his voice was a whisper now.

"It's perfect," I said.

"Well, naturally, I'm not an architect for nothing," he said. And then, after a moment: "We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?"

"Sure you do," I said.

He seemed to be snoring. I looked at his face: his eyes were open. Quim? I said. He didn't answer. Very slowly, I approached him and touched the mattress. Something inside it responded to my touch. Bubbles the size of an apple. I turned and left the room.

I spent the rest of the day with María and chasing María.

It rained a few times. The first time it stopped, a rainbow appeared. The second time there was nothing, black clouds and night in the valley.

Catalina O'Hara is red-haired, twenty-five, has a son, is separated, is pretty.

I also met Laura Jáuregui, who used to be Arturo Belano's girlfriend. She was at the party with Sofía Gálvez, Ulises Lima's lost love.

Both of them are pretty.

No, Laura is much prettier.

I drank too much. Visceral realists were swarming everywhere, although more than half of them were just university students in disguise.

Angélica and Pancho left early.

At a certain point during the night, María said to me: disaster is imminent.

NOVEMBER 22

I woke up at Catalina O'Hara's house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (María wasn't there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a few of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.

Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.

"In our language, of course," he clarified. "In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous."

Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén, Aleixandre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer, respectively. As a general rule, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to López Velarde or Efraín Huerta. There were lots of queers, on the other hand, from the mauler (although for a second I heard mobster) Díaz Mirón to the illustrious Homero Aridjis. It was necessary to go all the way back to Amado Nervo (whistles) to find a real poet, a faggot poet, that is, and not a philene like the resurrected and now renowned Manuel José Othón from San Luis Potosí, a bore if ever there was one. And speaking of bores: Manuel Acuña was a fairy and José Joaquín Pesado was a Grecian wood nymph, both longtime pimps of a certain kind of Mexican lyrical verse.

"And Efrén Rebolledo?" I asked.

"An extremely minor queer. His only virtue is that he was the first, if not the only, Mexican poet to publish a book in Tokyo: Japanese Poems, 1909. He was a diplomat, of course."

Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggot poets and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, according to San Epifanio, were faggot poets by birth, who out of weakness or for comfort's sake lived within and accepted-most of the time-the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France, and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.

"In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. Take the case of poor Sanguinetti (I won't start with Pavese, who was a sad freak, the only one of his kind, or Dino Campana, who dines at a separate table, the table of hopeless freaks). Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, where one hundred faggot poets, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the Kingdom of Letters (see, if you must, the shameful and malicious reflections of the Tel Quel poets). And the less said the better about the faggotry of the Russian Revolution, which, if we're to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one."

"Who?" they asked him. "Mayakovsky?"

"No."

"Esenin?"

"No."

"Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?"

"Hardly."

"Come on, Ernesto, tell us, the suspense is killing us."

"There was only one," said San Epifanio, "and now I'll tell you who it was, but he was the real thing, a steppes-and-snow faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov."

There was an opinion for every taste.

"And in Latin America, how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martín Adán. Period. New paragraph. Macedonio Fernández, maybe? The rest are queers like Huidobro, fairies like Alfonso Cortés (although some of his poems are authentically fagotty), butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would've driven Lacan crazy), sissies like Lezama Lima, a misguided reader of Góngora, and, along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban Revolution (Diego, Vitier, horrible Retamar, pathetic Guillén, inconsolable Fina García) except for Rogelio Nogueras, who is a darling and a nymph with the spirit of a playful faggot. But moving on. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal. The Mexican Contemporaries are queers too…"

"No!" shouted Belano. "Not Gilberto Owen!"

"In fact," San Epifanio continued unruffled, "Gorostiza's Death Without End, along with the poetry of Paz, is the 'Marseillaise' of the highly nervous and sedentary Mexican queer poets. More names: Gelman, nymph; Benedetti, queer; Nicanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Westphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; our beloved, untouchable Josemilio P., freak. And back to Spain, back to the beginning"-whistles-"Góngora and Quevedo, queers; San Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences between queers and faggots. Even in their sleep, the former beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the pimps they love. Faggots, on the other hand, live as if a stake is permanently churning their insides and when they look at themselves in the mirror (something they both love and hate to do with all their heart), they see the Pimp of Death in their own sunken eyes. For faggots and queers, pimp is the one word that can cross unscathed through the realms of nothingness (or silence or otherness). But then, too, nothing prevents queers and faggots from being good friends if they so desire, from neatly ripping one another off, criticizing or praising one another, publishing or burying one another in the frantic and moribund world of letters."

"And what about Cesárea Tinajero? Is she a faggot or a queer?" someone asked. I didn't recognize the voice.

"Oh, Cesárea Tinajero is horror itself," said San Epifanio.

NOVEMBER 23

I told María that her father had given me money.

"Do you think I'm a whore?" she said.

"Of course not!"

"Then don't take any money from that old nut-job!" she said.

This afternoon we went to a lecture by Octavio Paz. On the subway, María didn't speak to me. Angélica was with us and we met Ernesto at the lecture, at the Capilla Alfonsina. Afterward we went to a restaurant on Calle Palma where all the waiters were octogenarians. The restaurant was called La Palma de la Vida. Suddenly I felt trapped. The waiters, who were about to die at any minute, María's indifference, as if she'd already had enough of me, San Epifanio's distant, ironic smile, and even Angélica, who was the same as always-it all seemed like a trap, a humorous commentary on my own existence.

On top of everything, they said I hadn't understood Octavio Paz's lecture at all, and they might have been right. All I'd noticed were the poet's hands, which beat out the rhythm of his words as he read, a tic he'd probably picked up in adolescence.

"The kid is a complete ignoramus," said María, "a typical product of the law school."

I preferred not to respond. (Although several replies occurred to me.) What did I think about then? About my shirt, which stank. About Quim Font's money. About Laura Damián, who had died so young. About Octavio Paz's right hand, his index finger and middle finger, his ring finger, thumb and little finger, which cut through the air of the Capilla as if our lives depended on it. I also thought about home and bed.

Later two guys with long hair and leather pants came in. They looked like musicians but they were students at the dance school.

For a long time I stopped existing.

"Why do you hate me, María? What have I done to you?" I whispered in her ear.

She looked at me as if I were speaking to her from another planet. Don't be ridiculous, she said.

Ernesto San Epifanio heard her reply and smiled at me in a disturbing way. In fact everybody heard her, and everybody was smiling at me as if I'd gone crazy! I think I closed my eyes. I tried to join some conversation. I tried to talk about the visceral realists. The pseudomusicians laughed. At some point María kissed one of them and Ernesto San Epifanio patted me on the back. I remember that I caught his hand in the air or grabbed his elbow, and that I looked him in the eye and told him to back off, that I didn't need anybody's pity. I remember that María and Angélica decided to go with the dancers. I remember hearing myself shout at some point during the night:

"I earned your father's money!"

But I don't remember whether María was there to hear me or if by then I was alone.

NOVEMBER 24

I'm back at home. I've been back to the university (but not to class). I'd like to sleep with María. I'd like to sleep with Catalina O'Hara. I'd like to sleep with Laura Jáuregui. Sometimes I'd like to sleep with Angélica, but the circles under her eyes keep getting darker, and every day she's paler, thinner, less there.

NOVEMBER 25

Today I only saw Barrios and Jacinto Requena at Café Quito, and our conversation was mostly gloomy, as if something irreparably bad was about to happen. Still, we laughed a lot. They told me that Arturo Belano once gave a lecture at the Casa del Lago and when it was his turn to talk he forgot everything. I think the lecture was supposed to be on Chilean poetry and Belano improvised a talk about horror movies. Another time, Ulises Lima gave a lecture and no one came. We talked until they kicked us out.

NOVEMBER 26

No one was at Café Quito and I didn't feel like sitting at a table and reading in the middle of the dreary bustle at that time of day. For a while I walked along Bucareli. I called María, who wasn't home, walked past the Encrucijada Veracruzana twice, went in the third time, and there, behind the bar, was Rosario.

I thought she wouldn't recognize me. Sometimes I don't even recognize myself! But Rosario looked at me and smiled, and after a while, once she had waited on a table of regulars, she came over.

"Have you written me my poem yet?" she said, sitting down beside me. Rosario has dark eyes, black, I'd say, and broad hips.

"More or less," I said, with an ever-so-slight feeling of triumph.

"All right, then, read it to me."

"My poems are meant to be read, not spoken," I said. I think José Emilio Pacheco claimed something similar recently.

"Exactly, so read it to me," said Rosario.

"What I mean is, it's better if you read it yourself."

"No, you'd better do it. If I read it myself, I probably won't understand it."

I chose one of my latest poems at random and read it to her.

"I don't understand it," said Rosario, "but thank you anyway."

For a second I waited for her to ask me back to the storage room. But Rosario wasn't Brígida, that much was immediately clear. Then I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed. Rosario, who had gone off to wait on other tables, came back to me.

"Have you written Brígida some poetry too?" she asked, gazing into my eyes, her thighs grazing the edge of the table.

"No, just you," I said.

"They told me what happened the other day."

"What happened the other day?" I asked, trying to seem distant. Pleasant, but distant.

"Poor Brígida has been crying over you," said Rosario.

"And why is that? Have you seen her crying?"

"We've all seen her. She's crazy about you, Mr. Poet. You must have some special thing with women."

I think I blushed, but at the same time I was flattered.

"It's nothing… special," I murmured. "Did she tell you anything?"

"She told me lots of things, do you want to know what she said?"

"All right," I said, although the truth is I wasn't very sure I wanted to hear Brígida's confidences. Almost immediately, I despised myself. Human beings are ungrateful, I said to myself, thoughtless and quick to forget.

"But not here," said Rosario. "In a little while I get an hour off. Do you know where the gringo's pizzeria is? Wait for me there."

I said I would, and I left the Encrucijada Veracruzana. Outside the day had turned cloudy and a strong wind was making people walk faster than usual or take shelter in the entrances to stores. When I passed Café Quito I glanced in and didn't see anyone I knew. For a minute I thought about calling María again, but I didn't.

The pizzeria was full and people were standing up to eat the slices that the gringo in person cut with a big chef's knife. I watched him for a while. I thought that the business must bring in good money and I was happy because the gringo seemed nice. He did everything himself: mix the dough, spread tomato sauce and mozzarella, put the pizzas in the oven, cut them, hand the slices to the customers who crowded around the counter, make more pizzas, and start all over again. Everything except take money and make change. That job was handled by a dark kid, maybe fifteen, with very short hair, who constantly consulted with the gringo in a low voice, as if he still didn't know the prices very well or wasn't good at math. After a while I noticed another odd detail. The gringo never let go of his big knife.

"Here I am," said Rosario, tugging on my sleeve.

She didn't look the same out on the street as she did at the Encrucijada Veracruzana. Outside, her face was less firm, her features more transparent, vaporous, as if on the street she were in danger of turning invisible.

"Let's walk a little way, then you can treat me to something, okay?"

We started to walk toward Reforma. Rosario took my arm the first time we crossed the street and didn't let go.

"I want to be like your mother," she said, "but don't get the wrong idea, I'm not a slut like that Brígida, I want to help you, be good to you, I want to be with you when you become famous, darling."

This woman must be crazy, I thought, but I didn't say anything. I just smiled.

NOVEMBER 27

Everything is getting complicated. Horrible things are happening. At night I wake up screaming. I dream about a woman with the head of a cow. Its eyes stare at me. With touching sadness, actually. On top of it all, I had a little "man-to-man" talk with my uncle. He made me swear that I wasn't doing drugs. No, I said, I don't do drugs, I swear. None at all? he said. What does that mean? I said. What do you mean what does that mean! he roared. Exactly what I say, what do you mean? Could you please be a little more precise, I said, shrinking like a snail. At night I called María. She wasn't there, but I talked to Angélica for a while. How are you? she said. Not very well, really, I said, in fact, pretty bad. Are you sick? said Angélica. No, nervous. I'm not very well either, said Angélica, I can hardly sleep. I would've liked to ask her more, one ex-virgin to another, but I didn't.

NOVEMBER 28

Horrible things keep happening, dreams, nightmares, impulses I indulge that are completely out of my control. It's like when I was fifteen and always masturbating. Three times a day, five times a day, nothing was enough! Rosario wants to marry me. I told her I didn't believe in marriage. Well, she said with a laugh, married or not, what I'm trying to say is that I NEED to live with you. Live together, I said, in the SAME house? Well, of course, in the same house, or in the same ROOM, if we don't have enough money to RENT a house. Or even in a cave, she said, I'm not PICKY. Her face shone, whether from sweat or pure faith in what she was saying I'm not sure. The first time we did it was at her place, a crummy tenement building way out in the Colonia Merced Bal-buena, near the Calzada de la Viga. The room was full of postcards of Veracruz and pictures of movie actors tacked to the walls.

"Is it your first time, papacito?" Rosario asked me.

I said yes, I don't know why.

NOVEMBER 29

I drift from place to place like a piece of flotsam. Today I went to Catalina O'Hara's house without being invited and without calling first. It so happened that she was there. She'd just gotten home and her eyes were red, an unmistakable sign that she'd been crying. At first she didn't recognize me. I asked her why she was crying. Man trouble, she said. I had to bite my tongue not to say that if she needed someone I was there, ready and willing. We had some whiskey-I need it, said Catalina-and then we went to pick up her son at nursery school. Catalina drove like a maniac and I felt sick. On the way home, as I played with her son in the backseat, she asked whether I wanted to see her paintings. I said yes. In the end we finished half a bottle of whiskey and after Catalina put her son to bed she started to cry again. Don't go near her, I told myself, she's a MOTHER. Then I thought about graves, about fucking on a grave, about sleeping in a grave. Luckily, the painter she shares the house and studio with came in a few minutes later and the three of us started to make dinner together. Catalina's friend is separated, but evidently she handles it better. As we were eating she told jokes. Painter jokes. I'd never heard a woman tell such good jokes (unfortunately I can't remember a single one). Then, why I don't know, they started to talk about Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. According to Catalina's friend, there was a poet who was six and a half feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, the nephew of an administrator at UNAM, who was looking to beat them up. Knowing he was after them, they'd disappeared. But Catalina O'Hara didn't buy it; according to her, our friends were off looking for Cesárea Tinajero's lost papers, hidden in archives and used bookstores around Mexico City. I left at midnight, and when I was outside all of a sudden I had no idea where to go. I called María, prepared to tell her everything about Rosario (and while I was at it, about the affaire in the storage room with Brígida) and ask her to forgive me, but the telephone rang and rang and no one answered. The whole Font family had disappeared. So I set off south, toward Ulises Lima's rooftop. When I arrived, no one was there, so I ended up heading downtown again, toward Calle Bucareli. Once I got there, before I went to the Encrucijada Veracruzana, I looked in the window of Café Amarillo (Quito was closed). At one of the tables, I saw Pancho Rodríguez. He was alone with a half-drunk cup of coffee in front of him. He had a book on the table, one hand flat on the pages to hold it open, and his face was twisted in an expression of intense pain. From time to time he grimaced, making faces that were terrifying to see through the window. Either the book he was reading was having a wrenching effect on him, or he had a toothache. At one moment he raised his head and looked all around, as if he sensed that he was being watched. I hid. When I looked in the window again, Pancho was still reading and the expression of pain had disappeared from his face. Rosario and Brígida were working that night at the Encrucijada Veracruzana. Brígida came up to me first. In her face I detected bitterness and resentment, but also the suffering of the rejected. Honestly, I felt sorry for her! Everybody was suffering! I bought her a tequila and listened without flinching to everything she had to say to me. Then Rosario came over and said that she didn't like to see me standing at the bar writing, like an orphan. There's no free table, I said and went on writing. My poem is called "Everybody Suffers." I don't care if people stare.

NOVEMBER 30

Last night something really bad happened. I was at the Encrucijada Vera-cruzana, leaning on the bar, switching back and forth between writing poems and writing in my diary (I have no problem going from one format to the other), when Rosario and Brígida started to scream at each other at the back of the bar. Soon the grisly drunks were taking sides and cheering them on so energetically that I couldn't concentrate on my writing anymore and decided to slip away.

I don't know what time it was, but it was late, and outside the fresh air struck me in the face. As I walked I started to feel like writing again, recovering the inclination if not the inspiration (does inspiration really exist?). I turned the corner at the Reloj Chino and started to walk toward La Ciudadela looking for a café where I could keep working. I crossed the Jardín Morelos, empty and eerie, but with glimpses of secret life in its corners, bodies and laughter (giggles) that mocked the solitary passerby (or so it seemed to me then). I crossed Niños Héroes, crossed Plaza Pacheco (which commemorates José Emilio's grandfather and which was empty, no shadows or laughter this time), and as I was about to turn up Revillagigedo toward the Alameda, Quim Font emerged or materialized from around a corner. The shock almost killed me. He was wearing a suit and tie (but there was something about the suit and tie that made them look all wrong together), and he was dragging a girl after him, her elbow firmly in his grip. They were going the same way I was, although on the other side of the street, and it took me a few seconds to react. The girl Quim was dragging after him wasn't Angélica, as I had irrationally supposed when I saw her, although her height and build added to my confusion.

Clearly the girl had no great desire to follow Quim, but neither could it be said that she was putting up much resistance. As I drew level with them, heading up Revillagigedo toward the Alameda, I couldn't stop staring, as if to make sure that the nocturnal passerby was Quim and not an apparition, and then he saw me too. He recognized me right away.

"García Madero!" he shouted. "Over here, man!"

I crossed the street, taking great precautions or pretending to (since at that moment there were no cars on Revillagigedo), possibly in order to put off my meeting with María's father for a few seconds. When I reached the other side of the street, the girl raised her head and looked at me. It was Lupe, whom I'd met in Colonia Guerrero. She showed no sign of recognizing me. Of course, the first thing I thought was that Quim and Lupe were looking for a hotel.

"You're exactly the person we wanted to see!" said Quim Font.

I said hello to Lupe.

"How're things?" she said with a smile that froze my heart.

"I'm looking for a safe place for this young lady to stay," said Quim, "but I can't find a decent goddamn hotel anywhere in the neighborhood."

"Well, there are plenty of hotels around here," said Lupe. "What you really mean is that you don't want to spend much."

"Money isn't a problem. If you have it, you have it, and if you don't, you don't."

Only then did I notice that Quim was very nervous. The hand with which he was gripping Lupe trembled spasmodically, as if Lupe's arm were charged with electricity. He blinked fiercely and bit his lip.

"Is there some problem?" I asked.

Quim and Lupe looked at me for a few seconds (both of them seemed about to explode) and then they laughed.

"We're fucked," said Lupe.

"Do you know of a place we can hide this young lady?" said Quim.

Nervous as he may have been, he was also extremely happy.

"I don't know," I said, to say something.

"I don't suppose we could use your house?"

"Absolutely impossible."

"Why don't you let me handle my own problems?" said Lupe.

"Because no one escapes from under my protection!" said Quim, winking at me. "And also because I know you can't."

"Let's go get some coffee," I said, "and we'll come up with something."

"I expected no less of you, García Madero," said Quim. "I knew you wouldn't let me down."

"But it was pure coincidence that I ran into you!" I said.

"Oh, coincidence," said Quim, sucking air into his lungs like the titan of Calle Revillagigedo. "There's no such thing as coincidence. When it comes down to it, everything is ordained. The goddamn Greeks called it destiny."

Lupe looked at him and smiled the way you smile at crazy people. She was wearing a miniskirt and a black sweater. I thought the sweater was María's, or at least it smelled like María.

We started to walk, heading right on Victoria to Dolores, where we went into a Chinese café. We sat down near a cadaverous-looking man who was reading the paper. Quim inspected the place, then shut himself in the bathroom for a few minutes. Lupe followed him with her eyes and for an instant she gazed at him like a woman in love. Suddenly I just knew they'd slept together, or were planning to momentarily.

When Quim returned, he'd washed his hands and face and splashed water on his hair. Since there was no towel in the bathroom he hadn't dried off, and water was running down his temples.

"These places bring back memories of the worst times of my life," he said.

Then he was quiet. Lupe and I were silent for a while too.

"When I was young I knew a deaf man. Actually, he was a deaf-mute," Quim went on after a moment of thought. "The deaf-mute was always at the student cafeteria where I would go with a group of friends from the architecture department. One of them was the painter Pérez Camargo. I'm sure you've heard of him or know his work. At the cafeteria we always saw the deaf-mute, who sold pencil cases, toys, cards printed with the sign-language alphabet. Trinkets, basically, to make a few extra pesos. He was a nice guy, and sometimes he would come sit at our table. In fact, I think some of us were stupid enough to consider him our mascot, and more than one of us even learned some sign language, just for fun. The deaf-mute may actually have been the one who taught us, I can't remember now. Anyway, one night I went into a Chinese café like this, but in Colonia Narvarte, and I bumped into the deaf-mute. God only knows what I was doing there. It wasn't a neighborhood where I spent much time. Maybe I was on my way home from some girlfriend's house, but anyway, let's just say I was a little upset, in the middle of one of my depressive episodes. It was late. The café was empty. I sat at the counter or a table close to the door. At first I thought I was the only customer in the place. But when I got up and went to the bathroom (to do my business or cry in peace!) I discovered the deaf-mute in the back half of the café, in a kind of second room. He was alone too, and reading the paper, and he didn't see me. The strange turns life takes. When I passed him he didn't see me and I didn't greet him. I guess I didn't think I could bear his happiness. But when I came out of the bathroom everything had changed somehow, and I decided to go up to him. He was still there, reading, and I said hello to him and jostled the table a little so that he would notice I was there. Then the deaf-mute raised his head. He seemed half asleep, and he looked at me without recognizing me and said hello."

"Jesus," I said, and the hair rose on the back of my neck.

"You get it, García Madero," said Quim, looking at me sympathetically, "I was scared too. The truth is, all I wanted was to get the hell out of that place."

"I don't know what you were scared of," said Lupe.

Quim ignored her.

"It was all I could do not to go running out of there screaming," he said. "The only thing that kept me from leaving was the knowledge that the deaf-mute hadn't recognized me yet and that I had to pay the bill. Still, I couldn't finish my coffee, and when I was out in the street I took off running, shamelessly."

"I can imagine," I said.

"It was like seeing the devil," said Quim.

"The guy could talk fine," I said.

"Perfectly fine! He looked up and said hello to me. He even had a nice voice, for God's sake."

"It wasn't the devil," said Lupe, "although maybe it was, you never know. But in this case I don't think it was the devil."

"Please, you know I don't believe in the devil, Lupe," said Quim. "It's a manner of speaking."

"Who do you think it was?" I asked.

"A narc. An informer," said Lupe, grinning from ear to ear.

"Well, of course, you must be right," I said.

"And why would he be friendly to us, pretending he was mute?" said Quim.

"Deaf-mute," I said.

"Because you were students," said Lupe.

Quim looked at Lupe as if he were about to kiss her.

"You're so smart, Lupita."

"Don't make fun of me," she said.

"I'm serious, damn it."

At one in the morning we left the Chinese café and went looking for a hotel. At around two we finally found one on Río de la Loza. Along the way they explained to me what had happened to Lupe. Her pimp had tried to kill her. When I asked why, they told me that it was because Lupe didn't want to work in the afternoons anymore; she wanted to go to school.

"Congratulations, Lupe," I said. "What are you going to study?"

"Contemporary dance," she said.

"At the dance school with María?"

"That's right. With Paco Duarte."

"But can you enroll just like that, without taking some test?"

Quim looked at me as if I were in some other dimension.

"Lupe has influential friends of her own, García Madero, and we're all prepared to help her. She doesn't need to pass any fucking test."

The hotel was called the Media Luna and contrary to my expectations, after Quim took a look at the room and spoke a few words in private to the night clerk, he told Lupe good night and warned her not even to think about leaving without letting him know. Lupe said goodbye to us at the door to her room. Don't see us out, Quim said. Later, as we were walking toward Reforma, he explained that he'd had to give the clerk a small tip to get him to take Lupe without asking too many questions, but especially, if it came down to it, not to give out too many answers.

"What I'm afraid of," he told me, "is that tonight her pimp's going to check every hotel in Mexico City."

I suggested that maybe the police could take care of the problem or at least issue some kind of restraining order.

"Don't be an ass, García Madero. Alberto has friends in the police. How else do you think he runs his rackets? All the whores in Mexico City are controlled by the police."

"Come on. That's hard to believe," I said. "Maybe there are some officers who take bribes to look the other way, but to say that all of them…"

"The prostitution business in Mexico City and all of Mexico is controlled by the police, get that into your head once and for all," said Quim. And after a while, he added: "We're on our own in this."

At Niños Héroes he caught a taxi. Before he got in he made me promise that the next day first thing I'd be at his house.

DECEMBER 1

I didn't go to the Fonts' house. I spent all day having sex with Rosario.

DECEMBER 2

I ran into Jacinto Requena walking along Bucareli.

We went to get two slices of pizza at the gringo's place. As we ate he told me that Arturo had ordered the first purge of visceral realism.

I was stunned. I asked him how many he'd kicked out. Five, said Requena. I assume I wasn't one of them, I said. No, not you, said Requena. The news came as a great relief. Those purged were Pancho Rodríguez, Luscious Skin, and three poets I didn't know.

While I was in bed with Rosario, it occurred to me that Mexican avant-garde poetry was undergoing its first schism.

Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine.

DECEMBER 3

I have to admit that I have more fun in bed with Rosario than with María.

DECEMBER 4

But whom do I love? Yesterday it rained all night. The building's outdoor stairways looked like Niagara Falls. I kept a tally as we made love. Rosario was amazing, but to preserve the integrity of the experiment, I didn't tell her so. She came fifteen times. The first few times she had to cover her mouth so she wouldn't wake the neighbors. The last few times I was afraid she was going to have a heart attack. Sometimes she seemed to swoon in my arms and other times she arched as if a ghost were tickling her spine. I came three times. Later we went outside and bathed in the rain spilling over the stairwells. It's strange: my sweat is hot and Rosario's is cold and reptilian, with a bittersweet taste (mine is definitely salty). In total we spent four hours fucking. Then Rosario dried me, dried herself, tidied up the room in a heartbeat (it's incredible how industrious and practical the woman is), and went to sleep, because the next day she had to work. I sat at the table and wrote a poem that I called "15/3." Then I read William Burroughs until dawn.

DECEMBER 5

Today Rosario and I had sex from midnight until four-thirty in the morning and I clocked her again. She came ten times, I came twice. And yet the time we spent making love was longer than yesterday. Between poems (as Rosario slept), I made some calculations. If you come fifteen times in four hours, in four and a half hours you should come eighteen times, not ten. The same ratio goes for me. Are we already in a rut?

Then there's María. I think about her every day. I'd like to see her, sleep with her, talk to her, call her, but when it comes down to it I'm incapable of taking a single step in her direction. And then, when I make a cool assessment of my sexual encounters with her and with Rosario, I have to admit that I have a better time with Rosario. If nothing else, I learn more!

DECEMBER 6

Today I had sex with Rosario from three to five in the afternoon. She came twice, maybe three times, I don't know, and I'd rather leave the exact figure shrouded in mystery. I came twice. Before she went to work I told her Lupe's story. Contrary to what I expected, she wasn't very sympathetic to Lupe or Quim or me. I told her about Alberto, Lupe's pimp, too, and to my surprise she showed quite a bit of understanding for him, only reproaching him, and then not severely, for working as a pimp. When I told her that this Alberto could be a very dangerous person and that there was a risk that if he found Lupe he would do her real harm, she answered that a woman who abandoned her man deserved all that and more.

"But you don't have to worry, darling," she said, "that's not your problem. You have your true love by your side, thank God."

Rosario's declaration made me sad. For an instant I imagined the unknown Alberto, his huge cock and his huge knife and a fierce look on his face, and I thought that if Rosario met him on the street she would be attracted to him. Also: that in some way he was coming between María and me. For an instant, that is, I imagined Alberto measuring his cock with his kitchen knife and I imagined the notes of a song, evocative and suggestive, although of what I couldn't say, drifting in the window (a sinister window!) along with the night air, and all of it together made me extremely sad.

"Don't be gloomy, darling," said Rosario.

And I also imagined María making love with Alberto. And Alberto smacking María on the buttocks. And Angélica making love with Pancho Rodríguez (ex-visceral realist, thank God!). And María making love with Luscious Skin. And Alberto making love with Angélica and María. And Alberto making love with Catalina O'Hara. And Alberto making love with Quim Font. And in the final instance, as the poet says, I imagined Alberto advancing over a carpet of bodies splattered with semen (a semen of deceptive consistency and color, because it looked like blood and shit) toward the hill where I stood, still as a statue, although everything in me wanted to flee, go running down the other side and lose myself in the desert.

DECEMBER 7

Today I went to my uncle's office and told him everything.

"Uncle," I said, "I'm living with a woman. That's why I don't come home to sleep. But there's no need for you to worry because I'm still going to class and I plan to finish my degree. Otherwise, I'm fine. I eat a good breakfast. I get two meals a day."

My uncle looked at me without getting up from his desk.

"What money do you plan to live on? Have you found work or is she supporting you?"

I answered that I didn't know yet, and that for now, Rosario was in fact covering my expenses, which were modest anyway.

He wanted to know who this woman was I was living with, and I told him. He wanted to know what she did. I told him, maybe slightly glossing over the coarser aspects of the job of bar girl. He wanted to know how old she was. From then on, despite my initial resolve, everything was a lie. I said that Rosario was eighteen when she's almost definitely older than twenty-two, maybe even twenty-five, although that's only a guess, since I've never asked her; it doesn't seem right to seek out the information unless she volunteers it herself.

"Just so you don't make a fool of yourself," said my uncle, and he wrote me a check for five thousand pesos.

Before I left he urged me to call my aunt that night.

I went to the bank to cash the check and then I stopped by some of the downtown bookstores. I looked in at Café Quito. The first time I didn't see anyone. I ate there and went back to Rosario's room, where I sat reading and writing until late. After dark I went back and found Jacinto Requena dying of boredom. None of the visceral realists except for him, he said, were showing their faces at the café. Everybody was afraid of running into Arturo Belano, though their fears were unwarranted since the Chilean hadn't been there in days. According to Requena (who is definitely the most laid-back of the visceral realists), Belano had begun to kick more poets out of the group. Ulises Lima was remaining discreetly in the background, but apparently he supported Belano's decisions. I asked who'd gotten purged this time. He named two poets I didn't know and Angélica Font, Laura Jáuregui, and Sofía Gálvez.

"He's expelled three women!" I exclaimed, unable to help myself.

Moctezuma Rodríguez, Catalina O'Hara, and Jacinto himself were hanging in the balance. You, Jacinto? Belano hasn't been wasting any time, said Requena, resigned. And me? No, no one's said anything about you yet, said Requena, sounding unsure. I asked him the reason for the expulsions. He didn't know. He repeated his original opinion: temporary madness on the part of Arturo Belano. Then he explained to me (although this I already knew) that Breton recklessly indulged in the same sport. Belano thinks he's Breton, said Requena. Actually, all the capi di famiglia of Mexican poetry think they're Breton, he sighed. And the people who were expelled, what are they saying? Why don't they form a new group? Requena laughed. Most of the people who were expelled, he said, don't even know they've been expelled! And those who do know couldn't care less about visceral realism. You might say Arturo has done them a favor.

"Pancho couldn't care less? Luscious Skin couldn't care less?"

"Those two might care. The others have just been relieved of a burden. Now they're free to join the ranks of the peasant poets or go kiss up to Paz."

"What Belano is doing doesn't seem very democratic to me," I said.

"True enough. It isn't exactly what you might call democratic."

"We should go see him and tell him," I said.

"No one knows where he is. He and Ulises have disappeared."

For a while we sat watching the Mexico City night through the window.

Outside people were walking fast, hunched over, not as if they were expecting a storm, but as if the storm were already here. Still, no one seemed to be afraid.

Later Requena started to talk about Xóchitl and the baby they were going to have. I asked what they would call it.

"Franz," said Requena.

DECEMBER 8

Since I don't have anything to do, I've decided to go looking for Belano and Ulises Lima in the bookstores of Mexico City. I've discovered the antiquarian bookstore Plinio el Joven, on Venustiano Carranza. The Lizardi bookstore, on Donceles. The antiquarian bookstore Rebeca Nodier, at Mesones and Pino Suárez. At Plinio el Joven the only clerk is a little old man who, after waiting obsequiously on a "scholar from the Colegio de México," soon fell asleep in a chair next to a stack of books, supremely ignoring me. I stole an anthology of Marco Manilio's Astronómica, with a prologue by Alfonso Reyes, and Diary of an Unknown Writer by a Japanese writer from the Second World War. At Lizardi I thought I saw Monsiváis. I tried to sidle up next to him to see what book he was looking at, but when I reached him, Monsiváis turned around and stared straight at me, with a hint of a smile, I think, and keeping a firm grip on his book and hiding the title, he went to talk to one of the clerks. Provoked, I filched a little book by an Arab poet called Omar Ibn al-Farid, published by the university, and an anthology of young American poets put out by City Lights. By the time I left, Monsiváis was gone. The Rebeca Nodier bookstore is tended by Rebeca Nodier herself, an old woman in her eighties who is completely blind and wears unruly white dresses that match her dentures; armed with a cane and alerted by the creaky wooden floor, she hops up and introduces herself to everyone who walks into her store, I'm Rebeca Nodier, etc., finally asking in turn the name of the "lover of literature" she has the "pleasure of meeting" and inquires what kind of literature he or she is looking for. I told her that I was interested in poetry, and to my surprise, Mrs. Nodier said all poets were bums but they weren't bad in bed. Especially if they don't have any money, she went on. Then she asked me how old I was. Seventeen, I said. Oh, you're still a pipsqueak, she exclaimed. And then: you're not planning to steal any of my books, are you? I promised her that I would rather die. We chatted for a while, and then I left.

DECEMBER 9

The Mexican literary mafia has nothing on the Mexican bookseller mafia. Bookstores visited: the Librería del Sótano, in a basement on Avenida Juárez where the clerks (numerous and neatly uniformed) kept me under strict surveillance and from which I managed to leave with volumes by Roque Dalton, Lezama Lima, and Enrique Lihn. The Librería Mexicana, staffed by three samurais, on Calle Aranda, near the Plaza de San Juan, where I stole a book by Othón, a book by Amado Nervo (wonderful!), and a chapbook by Efraín Huerta. The Librería Pacífico, at Bolívar and 16 de Septiembre, where I stole an anthology of American poets translated by Alberto Girri and a book by Ernesto Cardenal. And in the evening, after reading, writing, and a little fucking: the Viejo Horacio, on Correo Mayor, staffed by twins, from which I left with Gamboa's Santa, a novel to give to Rosario; an anthology of poems by Kenneth Fearing, translated and with a prologue by someone called Doctor Julio Antonio Vila, in which Doctor Vila talks in a vague, question mark-filled way about a trip that Fearing took to Mexico in the 1950s, "an ominous and fruitful trip," writes Doctor Vila; and a book on Buddhism written by the Televisa adventurer Alberto Montes. Instead of the book by Montes I would have preferred the autobiography of the ex-featherweight world champion Adalberto Redondo, but one of the inconveniences of stealing books-especially for a novice like myself-is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.

DECEMBER 10

Librería Orozco, on Reforma, between Oxford and Praga: Nueve novísimos, the Spanish anthology; Corps et biens, by Robert Desnos; and Dr. Brodie's Report, by Borges. Librería Milton, at Milton and Darwin: Vladimir Holan's A Night with Hamlet and Other Poems, a Max Jacob anthology, and a Gunnar Ekelöf anthology. Librería El Mundo, on Río Nazas: selected poems by Byron, Shelley, and Keats; Stendhal's The Red and the Black (which I've already read); and Lichtenberg's Aphorisms, translated by Alfonso Reyes. This afternoon, as I arranged my books in the room, I thought about Reyes. Reyes could be my little refuge. A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

DECEMBER 11

Before, I didn't have time for anything, and now I have time for everything. I used to spend my life on the bus and subway, having to cross the city from north to south at least twice a day. Now I walk everywhere, read a lot, write a lot. Every day I make love. In our tenement room, a little library has already begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores. Last on the list, the Batalla del Ebro: its owner is a little old Spaniard named Crispín Zamora. I think we've gotten to be friends. Naturally, the store is almost always deserted and Don Crispín likes to read but he doesn't mind spending hours at a time talking about any old thing. Sometimes I need to talk too. I confessed that I was making the rounds of Mexico City bookstores looking for two friends who had disappeared, that I'd been stealing books because I didn't have any money (Don Crispín immediately gave me a Porrúa edition of Euripides translated by Father Garibay), that I admired Alfonso Reyes because in addition to Greek and Latin he knew French, English, and German, and that I had stopped going to the university. Everything I tell him makes him laugh, except my not going to class anymore, because it's important to have a degree. He distrusts poetry. When I explained that I was a poet, he said that distrust wasn't exactly the right word and that he'd known some poets. He wanted to read my poems. When I brought them to him I could see he found them a little confusing, but when he was done reading he didn't say anything. All he asked me was why I used so many ugly-sounding words. What do you mean, Don Crispín? I asked. Blasphemy, swear words, curses, insults. Oh, that, I said, well, it must just be the way I am. When I left that afternoon, Don Crispín gave me Ocnos, by Cernuda, and urged me to study it, because Cernuda was also a poet with a difficult disposition.

DECEMBER 12

After I walked Rosario to the door of the Encrucijada Veracruzana (all the waitresses, including Brígida, greeted me effusively, as if I'd become part of the club or the family, all of them convinced that someday I'd be an important person in Mexican literature), my feet carried me unthinkingly to Río de la Loza and the Media Luna hotel, where Lupe was staying.

In the shoe box-size lobby, much more sinister than I remembered it, the wallpaper patterned with flowers and bleeding deer, a squat man with a broad back and big head said there was no Lupe staying there. I demanded to see the register. The clerk told me it was impossible, that the register was absolutely confidential. I argued that it was my sister, separated from my brother-in-law, and that the reason I was there was to bring her money to pay the hotel bill. The clerk must have had a sister in similar circumstances, because he immediately became more understanding.

"Is your sister a thin little dark girl who goes by Lupe?"

"That's her."

"Wait just a second, I'll go knock on her door."

While the receptionist went up to get her I looked through the register. The night of November 30, someone called Guadalupe Martínez had arrived. That same day, a Susana Alejandra Torres, a Juan Aparicio, and a María del Mar Jiménez had checked in. Following my instincts, I decided that Susana Alejandra Torres, not Guadalupe Martínez, must be the Lupe I was looking for. I decided not to wait for the receptionist to come down and I took the stairs in threes to the second floor, room 201, where Susana Alejandra Torres was staying.

I knocked just once. I heard footsteps, a window closing, whispers, more footsteps, and finally the door opened and I found myself face-to-face with Lupe.

It was the first time I'd seen her with so much makeup on. Her lips were painted a deep red, her eyes lined with pencil, her cheeks smeared with glitter. She recognized me at once:

"You're María's friend," she exclaimed with undisguised happiness.

"Let me in," I said. Lupe looked over her shoulder and then stood aside. The room was a jumble of women's clothes strewn in the most unlikely places.

I could tell right away that we weren't alone. Lupe was wearing a green bathrobe and she was smoking furiously. I heard a noise in the bathroom. Lupe looked at me and then looked toward the bathroom door, which was half open. I was sure it must be a client. But then I saw a paper with drawings on it lying on the floor, the mock-up of the new visceral realist magazine, and the discovery filled me with alarm. I thought, rather illogically, that it was María in the bathroom, or Angélica, and I didn't know how I was going to justify my presence at the Media Luna to them.

Lupe, who hadn't taken her eyes off me, noticed my discovery and started to laugh.

"You can come out now," she shouted, "it's your daughter's friend."

The bathroom door opened and Quim Font came out wrapped in a white robe. His eyes were weepy and there were traces of lipstick on his face. He greeted me warmly. In his hand he was holding the folder with the plan for the magazine in it.

"You see, García Madero," he said, "I'm always hard at work, always paying attention."

Then he asked me whether I'd been by his house.

"Not today," I said, and I thought about María again and everything seemed unbearably sordid and sad.

The three of us sat on the bed, Quim and I on the edge and Lupe under the covers.

Really, the situation was untenable!

Quim smiled, Lupe smiled, and I smiled, and none of us could bring ourselves to say anything. A stranger would have assumed that we were there to make love. The idea was gruesome. Just thinking about it made my stomach lurch. Lupe and Quim were still smiling. To say something, I started to talk about Arturo Belano's purge of the ranks of visceral realism.

"It was about time," said Quim. "All the freeloaders and incompetents should be tossed out. The movement only needs the pure of heart, like you, García Madero."

"True," I said, "but the more of us, the better, it seems to me."

"No, numbers are an illusion, García Madero. For our purposes, five is as good as fifty. That's what I told Arturo. Make heads roll. Shrink the inner circle until it's a microscopic dot."

I thought he was going off the rails, and I kept quiet.

"Where were we going to get with an idiot like Pancho Rodríguez, tell me that?"

"I don't know."

"Do you actually think he's a good poet? Does he strike you as a model member of the Mexican avant-garde?"

Lupe didn't say a thing. She just watched us and smiled. I asked Quim whether there was any news of Alberto.

"We're few and soon we'll be fewer," said Quim enigmatically. I didn't know whether he was referring to Alberto or the visceral realists.

"They've expelled Angélica too," I said.

"My daughter Angélica? Good Lord, that is news, man. I had no idea. When was this?"

"I don't know," I said, "Jacinto Requena told me."

"A poet who's won the Laura Damián prize! That takes some nerve, it really does! And I don't say so because she's my daughter!"

"Why don't we go for a walk?" said Lupe.

"Quiet, Lupita, I'm thinking."

"Don't be a pain in the ass, Joaquín, you can't tell me to be quiet. I'm not your daughter, remember?"

Quim laughed softly. It was a rabbity laugh that hardly disturbed the muscles of his face.

"Of course you're not my daughter. You can't write three words without making a spelling mistake."

"What? You think I'm illiterate, you asshole? Of course I can."

"No, you can't," said Quim, making a disproportionate effort to think. A scowl of pain etched itself on his face, reminding me of the expression on Pancho Rodríguez's face at Café Amarillo.

"Come on, test me."

"They shouldn't have done that to Angélica. It disgusts me the way those bastards are toying with people's feelings. We should eat something. I feel sick to my stomach," said Quim.

"Don't be a prick. Test me," said Lupe.

"Maybe Requena was exaggerating, maybe Angélica asked to be let go voluntarily. Since they'd expelled Pancho…"

"Pancho, Pancho, Pancho. That son of a bitch is nothing. He's nobody. Angélica doesn't give a damn whether they expel him, kill him, or give him a prize. He's a kind of Alberto," he added in an undertone, nodding toward Lupe.

"Don't get so upset, Quim, I only said it because they were together, weren't they?"

"What are you saying, Quim?" said Lupe.

"Nothing that's any of your business."

"Test me then, man. What do you think I am?"

"Root," said Quim.

"That's easy, give me paper and pencil."

I tore a sheet out of my notebook and handed it to her with my Bic.

"I've shed so many tears," said Quim as Lupe sat up in bed, her knees raised, the paper resting on her knees, "so many and what for?"

"Everything will be all right," I said.

"Have you ever read Laura Damián?" he asked me absently.

"No, never."

"Here it is, see what you think," said Lupe, showing him the paper. Quim frowned and said: fine. "Give me another word, but this time make it really hard."

"Anguish," said Quim.

"Anguish? That's easy."

"I have to talk to my daughters," said Quim, "I have to talk to my wife, my colleagues, my friends. I have to do something, García Madero."

"Relax, Quim, you have time."

"Listen, not a word of this to María, all right?"

"It's between the two of us, Quim."

"How does that look?" said Lupe.

"Excellent, García Madero, that's what I like to hear. I'll give you Laura Damián's book one of these days."

"How's that?" Lupe showed me the paper. She had spelled the word anguish perfectly.

"Couldn't be better," I said.

"Ragamuffin," said Quim.

"Excuse me?"

"Write the word ragamuffin," said Quim.

"Yikes, that really is hard," said Lupe, and she set to work immediately.

"Not a word about this to my daughters, then. To either of them. I'm counting on you, García Madero."

"Of course," I said.

"Now you'd better go. I'm going to spend a little while longer giving this dunce Spanish lessons, and then I'll be moving along too."

"All right, Quim, see you around."

When I got up the mattress bounced back and Lupe murmured something but didn't lift her eyes from the paper she was writing on. I saw a few scratched-out words. She was trying hard.

"If you see Arturo or Ulises, tell them it isn't right what they've done."

"If I see them," I said, shrugging my shoulders.

"It isn't a good way to make friends. Or to keep them."

I made a noise like laughter.

"Do you need money, García Madero?"

"No, Quim, not at all, thank you."

"You know you can always count on me. I was young and reckless once too. Now go. We'll get dressed in a little while and then head out for something to eat."

"My pen," I said.

"What?" said Quim.

"I'm going. I'd like my pen."

"Let her finish," said Quim, glancing at Lupe over his shoulder.

"Here, how does that look?" said Lupe.

"You got it wrong," said Quim. "I ought to give you a spanking."

I thought about the word ragamuffin. I'm not sure I'd have spelled it right the first time either. Quim got up and went to the bathroom. When he came out he had a black-and-gold mechanical pencil in his hand. He winked at me.

"Give him back the pen and write with this," he said.

Lupe returned my Bic. Goodbye, I said. She didn't answer.

DECEMBER 13

I called María. I talked to the maid. Miss María isn't in. When will she be home? No idea, may I ask who's calling? I didn't want to give my name and I hung up. I sat at Café Quito for a while, waiting to see whether anyone else would come, but it was hopeless. I called María again. No one answered the phone. I went walking to Montes, where Jacinto lives. Nobody was home. I ate a sandwich in the street and finished two poems I'd started the day before. Another call to the Font house. This time the voice of an unidentifiable woman answered. I asked whether it was Mrs. Font.

"No, it isn't," said the voice in a tone that made my scalp tingle.

It clearly wasn't María's voice. Nor was it that of the maid I had just spoken to. The only alternatives were Angélica or a stranger, maybe one of the sisters' friends.

"Who is this, please?"

"To whom do you wish to speak?"

"To María or Angélica," I said, feeling stupid and scared at the same time.

"This is Angélica," said the voice. "To whom am I speaking?"

"It's Juan," I said.

"Hello, Juan. How are you?"

It can't be Angélica, I thought, it simply can't be. But then I thought that everyone living in that house was crazy, so maybe it was possible after all.

"I'm fine," I said, shaking. "Is María there?"

"No," said the voice.

"All right, I'll call again," I said.

"Do you want to leave her a message?"

"No!" I said and I hung up.

I felt my forehead with my hand, thinking I must have a fever. At that moment, all I wanted was to be home with my aunt and uncle, studying or watching TV, but I knew that there was no turning back, that all I had was Rosario and Rosario's tenement room.

Without realizing it, I must have started to cry. I wandered aimlessly for a while, and when I tried to get my bearings I was in the middle of a bleak stretch of Colonia Anáhuac, surrounded by dying trees and peeling walls. I went into a place on Calle Texcoco and asked for a coffee. When it came, it was lukewarm. I don't know how long I spent there.

When I left it was night.

I called the Fonts again from another pay phone. The same woman's voice answered.

"Hello, Angélica, it's Juan García Madero," I said.

"Hello," said the voice.

I felt sick. Some kids were playing soccer in the street.

"I saw your father," I said. "He was with Lupe."

"What?"

"At the hotel where we have Lupe. Your father was there."

"What was he doing there?" The voice was uninflected; it was like talking to a brick wall, I thought.

"He was keeping her company," I said.

"Is Lupe all right?"

"Lupe's fine," I said. "It was your father who didn't seem to be doing very well. I thought he'd been crying, even if he was better by the time I got there."

"Hmm," said the voice. "And why was he crying?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe it was regret. Or maybe shame. He asked me not to tell you."

"Not to tell me what?"

"That I'd seen him there."

"Hmm," said the voice.

"When will María be home? Do you know where she is?"

"At the dance school," said the voice. "And I was just leaving."

"Where are you going?"

"To the university."

"All right, then, goodbye."

"Goodbye," said the voice.

I went walking back to Sullivan. When I crossed Reforma, near the statue of Cuauhtémoc, I heard someone call my name.

"Hands up, poet García Madero."

When I turned, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima were there, and I fainted.

When I woke up I was in Rosario's room, in bed, with Ulises and Arturo on either side of me trying and failing to get me to drink some herbal tea they'd just made. I asked what had happened, and they told me I'd fainted, that I'd thrown up and then I'd started to ramble incoherently. I told them about calling the Fonts' house. I said it was the call that had made me sick. At first they didn't believe me. Then they listened carefully to a detailed account of my latest adventures and delivered their verdict.

According to them, the problem was that I hadn't been talking to Angélica at all.

"And you knew it too, García Madero, and that's why you got sick," said Arturo, "from the fucking shock."

"What did I know?"

"That it was somebody else, not Angélica," said Ulises.

"No I didn't," I said.

"Unconsciously you did," said Arturo.

"But who was it, then?"

Arturo and Ulises laughed.

"There's actually a simple answer, and it's funny too."

"Stop torturing me, then, and tell me what it is," I said.

"Think a little," said Arturo. "Come on, use your head. Was it Angélica? Clearly not. Was it María? Even less likely. Who's left? The maid, but she isn't there at the time of day you called, and anyway you'd already talked to her and you would've recognized her voice, right?"

"Right," I said. "It definitely wasn't the maid."

"Who's left?" said Ulises.

"María's mother and Jorgito."

"I don't think it was Jorgito, was it?"

"No, it couldn't have been Jorgito," I admitted.

"And can you see María Cristina putting on an act like that?"

"Is María's mother called María Cristina?"

"That's her name," said Ulises.

"No, I really can't, but who was it, then? There's no one left."

"Someone crazy enough to imitate Angélica's voice," said Arturo, and he looked at me. "The only person in the house who would pull a weird stunt like that."

I looked from one to the other as gradually the answer began to take shape in my mind.

"Warm, warmer…" said Ulises.

"Quim," I said.

"Who else," said Arturo.

"That son of a bitch!"

Later I remembered the story about the deaf-mute that Quim had told me and I thought about child abusers who had themselves once been abused as children. Although now that I write it, the cause-and-effect relationship between the deaf-mute and Quim's personality shift doesn't seem so clear. Then I went storming out into the street and wasted coin after coin on futile calls to María's house. I talked to her mother, the maid, Jorgito, and, very late that night, Angélica (this time it was the real Angélica), but María was never there and Quim would never come to the phone.

For a while, Belano and Ulises Lima kept me company. I gave them my poems to read while I made the first phone calls. They said the poems weren't bad. The purge of visceral realism is just a joke, said Ulises. But do the people who were purged know it's a joke? Of course not, it wouldn't be funny if they did, said Arturo. So no one is expelled? Of course not. And what have you two been doing all this time? Nothing, said Ulises.

"There's some asshole who wants to beat us up," they admitted later.

"But there are two of you and only one of him."

"But we aren't violent, García Madero," said Ulises. "At least, I'm not, and neither is Arturo, anymore."

Between phone calls to the Fonts', I spent the evening with Jacinto Requena and Rafael Barrios at Café Quito. I told them what Belano and Ulises had told me. They must be finding things out about Cesárea Tinajero, they said.

DECEMBER 14

No one gives the visceral realists ANYTHING. Not scholarships or space in their magazines or invitations to book parties or readings.

Belano and Lima are like two ghosts.

If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?

I don't feel very good today.

DECEMBER 15

Don Crispín Zamora doesn't like to talk about the Spanish Civil War. So I asked him why he'd given his bookstore a military-sounding name. He confessed that he hadn't come up with the name himself. It was the previous owner, a Republican colonel who had covered himself in glory in the battle in question. I detected a hint of irony in Don Crispín's words. At his request, I talked to him about visceral realism. After he'd made a few observations like "realism is never visceral," "the visceral belongs to the oneiric world," etc., which I found rather disconcerting, he theorized that we underprivileged youth were left with no alternative but the literary avant-garde. I asked him what exactly he meant by underprivileged. I'm hardly underprivileged. At least not by Mexico City standards. But then I thought about the tenement room Rosario was sharing with me and I wasn't so sure he was wrong. The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispín, is that in the end people always turn into bastards. By now, I had the impression that Don Crispín was talking just for the sake of talking. The whole time I was sitting in a chair while he kept scurrying around moving books from one place to another or dusting stacks of magazines. At a certain moment, however, he turned around and asked how much it would cost him to sleep with me. I've noticed you're short on cash, which is the only reason I'd venture to propose such a thing. I was stunned.

"You're making a mistake, Don Crispín," I said.

"Don't take it the wrong way, my boy. I know I'm old and that's why I'm suggesting a transaction. Call it a reward."

"Are you homosexual, Don Crispín?"

The word was scarcely out of my mouth before I realized how stupid it was and I blushed. I didn't wait for him to answer. Did you think I was homosexual? Aren't you? asked Don Crispín.

"Ay, ay, ay, I've really put my foot in it. Forgive me, my boy, for heaven's sake," said Don Crispín, and he started to laugh.

I stopped wanting to go running out of the Batalla del Ebro, which had been my first reaction. Don Crispín asked me to give up my chair because he was laughing so hard he was afraid he might have a heart attack. When he had calmed down, still apologizing profusely, he asked me to understand that he was a timid homosexual (never mind my age, Juanito!) and that he was out of practice in the art of hooking up, always difficult even when it wasn't downright mysterious. You must think I'm an ass, and rightly so, he said. Then he confessed that it had been at least five years since he'd slept with anyone. Before I left, he insisted on giving me the Porrúa edition of the complete works of Sophocles and Aeschylus to make up for bothering me. I told him that I hadn't been bothered at all, but it would have seemed rude not to accept his gift. Life is shit.

DECEMBER 16

I'm sick for real. Rosario is making me stay in bed. Before she left for work she went out to borrow a thermos from a neighbor and she left me half a liter of coffee. Also four aspirin. I have a fever. I've started and finished two poems.

DECEMBER 17

Today a doctor came to see me. He looked at the room, looked at my books, and then took my blood pressure and felt different parts of my body. Afterward he went to talk to Rosario in a corner, in whispers, stressing his words with the emphatic motion of his shoulders. When he left I asked Rosario how she could have called a doctor without consulting me first. How much did you spend? I said. That doesn't matter, papacito. You're the only thing that matters.

DECEMBER 18

This afternoon I was shivering with fever when the door opened and my aunt and then my uncle came in, followed by Rosario. I thought I was hallucinating. My aunt threw herself on the bed, covering me with kisses. My uncle stood stoically by, waiting until my aunt had unburdened herself, and then he clapped me on the shoulder. The threats, scolding, and advice followed soon after. Basically, they wanted me to come straight home, or if not, then go to the hospital, where they intended to have me undergo a thorough examination. I refused. In the end there were threats and when they left I was laughing hysterically and Rosario was sobbing.

DECEMBER 19

First thing in the morning, Requena, Xóchitl, Rafael Barrios, and Barbara Patterson came to visit me. I asked them who had given them my address. Ulises and Arturo, they said. So they've appeared, I said. They've appeared and disappeared again, said Xóchitl. They're finishing work on an anthology of young Mexican poets, said Barrios. Requena laughed. It wasn't true, according to him. Too bad: for a moment I had hoped that they'd include some poems of mine. What they're doing is getting the money together to go to Europe, said Requena. Getting it together how? Selling pot left and right, how else, said Requena. The other day I saw them on Reforma with a backpack full of Acapulco Gold. I can't believe it, I said (but I remembered that the last time I'd seen them they had, in fact, been carrying a backpack). They gave me a little, said Jacinto, and he pulled out some weed. Xóchitl said that it wasn't good for me to smoke in my condition. I told her not to worry, that I was already feeling much better. You're the one who shouldn't smoke, said Jacinto, unless you want our baby to turn out retarded. Xóchitl said that there was no reason marijuana should hurt the fetus. Don't smoke, Xóchitl, said Requena. What hurts the fetus is bad vibes, said Xóchitl, bad food, alcohol, abuse of the mother, not marijuana. Don't smoke anyway, said Requena, just in case. Let her smoke if she wants, said Barbara Patterson. Fucking gringa, don't butt in, said Barrios. Once you've given birth, you can do whatever you want, but for now you'll have to go without, said Requena. While we smoked, Xóchitl went to sit in a corner of the room, next to some cardboard boxes where Rosario keeps the clothes she isn't wearing. Arturo and Ulises aren't saving money, she said (although they are setting a little aside, why deny it), they're putting the final touches on something that's going to blow everybody's minds. We looked at her, waiting to hear more. But Xóchitl was silent.

DECEMBER 20

Tonight I had sex with Rosario three times. I'm better now. But I'm still taking the medicine she bought for me, more to make her happy than anything else.

DECEMBER 21

Nothing to report. Life seems to have ground to a halt. Every day I make love to Rosario. While she's at work, I write and read. At night I make the rounds of the bars on Bucareli. Sometimes I stop in at the Encrucijada and the waitresses serve me first. At four in the morning Rosario comes home (when she's working the night shift) and we eat something light in our room, usually food that she brings from the bar. Then we make love until she falls asleep, and I begin to write.

DECEMBER 22

Today I went out early to take a walk. I'd been planning to head to the Batalla del Ebro and spend the time until lunch with Don Crispín, but when I got to the store it was closed. So I started to wander aimlessly, enjoying the morning sun, and almost without realizing it I came to Calle Mesones, where the Rebeca Nodier bookstore is. Although on my first visit I'd ruled the store out as a target, I decided to go in. No one was there. A sickly sweet, stuffy air hung over the books and the shelves. I heard voices coming from the back room, by which I deduced that the blind lady must be busy wrapping up some deal. I decided to wait and started leafing through old books. There was Ifigenia cruel and El plano oblicuo and Retratos reales e imaginarios, in addition to the five volumes of Simpatías y diferencias, all by Alfonso Reyes, and Prosas dispersas, by Julio Torri, and a book of stories, Mujeres, by someone called Eduardo Colín whom I'd never heard of, and Li-Po y otros poemas, by Tablada, and Catorce poemas burocráticos y un corrido reaccionario, by Renato Leduc, and Incidentes melódicos del mundo irracional, by Juan de la Cabada, and Dios en la tierra and Los días terrenales, by José Revueltas. Soon I got tired and took a seat in a little wicker chair. Just as I sat down, I heard a cry. The first thing that occurred to me was that someone was attacking Rebeca Nodier, and without thinking, I dashed into the inner room. A surprise awaited me behind the door. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano were poring over an old catalog on a table. When I burst into the room they raised their heads and for the first time I saw them look truly surprised. Beside them, Doña Rebeca was gazing up at the ceiling as if she were thinking or reminiscing. Nothing had happened to her. It was she who'd cried out, but her cry was a cry of surprise, not fear.

DECEMBER 23

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.

DECEMBER 24

A miserable Christmas. I called María. Finally I got to talk to her! I told her what was going on with Lupe and she said she knew everything. What do you know? I said.

"Well, that she ran away from her pimp and that she's finally decided to study at the dance school," she said.

"Do you know where she's living?"

"At a hotel," said María.

"Do you know which hotel?"

"Of course I know. The Media Luna. I go see her every afternoon. She's awfully lonely, poor thing."

"No, she isn't awfully lonely, your father makes sure of that," I said.

"My father is a saint and he's killing himself for despicable brats like you," she said.

I wanted to know what she meant by killing himself.

"Nothing."

"Tell me what the fuck you're trying to say!"

"Don't shout," she said.

"I want to know where I stand! I want to know who I'm talking to!"

"Don't shout," she said again.

Then she said that she had things to do, and she hung up.

DECEMBER 25

I've decided not to sleep with María ever again, but the Christmas holidays, the tension radiating from people on the streets downtown, poor Rosario's plans (she's all set to spend New Year's Eve at a nightclub-with me, of course, and dancing), only make me want to see María again, to undress her, to feel her legs on my back again, to slap (if she asks me to) the perfect tight curve of her ass.

DECEMBER 26

"Today I have a surprise for you, papuchi," announced Rosario as soon as she got home.

She started to kiss me, saying over and over again that she loved me and promising that she was going to start reading a book every two weeks to be "up to my level," which only embarrassed me, finally confessing that no one had ever made her so happy.

I must be getting old, because her verbal excesses gave me goose bumps.

Half an hour later we went walking to El Amanuense Azteca, a public bathhouse on Calle Lorenzo Boturini.

That was the surprise.

"We have to be nice and clean now that the new year is coming," said Rosario, winking at me.

I would've liked to slap her right there, then walk away and never see her again. (My nerves are shot.)

And yet, when we had passed through the frosted glass doors of the bathhouse, the mural or fresco that arched over the front desk seized my attention with mysterious force.

The anonymous artist had painted an Indian scribe writing on paper or parchment, lost in thought. Clearly, he was the Amanuense Azteca. Behind the scribe stretched hot springs, where Indians and conquistadors, bathing in pools set three in a row, were joined by Mexicans from colonial times, El Cura Hidalgo and Morelos, Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota, Benito Juárez surrounded by friends and enemies, President Madero, Carranza, Zapata, Obregón, soldiers in different uniforms or out of uniform, peasants, Mexico City workers, and movie actors: Cantinflas, Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Javier Solís, Aceves Mejía, María Félix, Tin Tan, Resortes, Calambres, Irma Serrano, and others I didn't recognize because they were in the farthest pools, and those really were tiny.

"Cool, huh?"

I stood there with my arms at my sides. Ecstatic.

Rosario's voice made me jump.

Before we turned down the hallway with our little towels and soap, I discovered that at each end of the mural there was a stone wall surrounding the springs. And on the other side of the wall, on a kind of plain or frozen sea, I saw shadowy animals, maybe the ghosts of animals (or the ghosts of plants) lying in wait, multiplying in a seething but silent siege.

DECEMBER 27

We've been back to El Amanuense Azteca. A success. The private rooms are carpeted, with a table, coat rack, and sofa, and a cement stall where the shower and steam taps are. The steam jet is at floor level, like in a Nazi movie. The door between the room and the stall is heavy, and there's a creepy, perpetually fogged-up peephole at eye level (although I have to stoop since I'm taller than the average person it was designed for). There's restaurant service. We shut ourselves in and order cuba libres. We shower, take steam baths, rest and dry ourselves on the sofa, then shower again. We make love in the stall, in a cloud of steam that hides our bodies. We fuck, shower, let the steam smother us. All we can see are our hands, our knees, sometimes the back of a neck or the tip of a breast.

DECEMBER 28

How many poems have I written?

Since it all began: 55 poems.

Total pages: 76.

Total lines: 2,453

I could put together a book by now. My complete works.

DECEMBER 29

Tonight, while I was waiting for Rosario at the bar of the Encrucijada Veracruzana, Brígida came by and said something about time passing.

"Pour me another tequila," I said, "and tell me what you mean."

In her look I caught something that I can only call victory, although it was a sad, resigned victory, more attuned to small signs of death than signs of life.

"What I meant was that time goes by," said Brígida as she filled my glass, "and once you were a stranger, but now you're like part of the family."

"I don't give a shit about the family," I said as I wondered where the fuck Rosario had gone.

"I didn't mean to insult you," said Brígida. "Or pick a fight. These days I don't feel like fighting with anyone."

I sat looking at her for a while, not knowing what to say. I would've liked to say you're being an idiot, Brígida, but I wasn't in the mood to fight with anyone either.

"What I meant was," said Brígida, looking behind her as if to make sure Rosario wasn't coming, "that I would've liked to fall in love with you too, believe me, I would've liked to live with you, give you spending money, make your meals, take care of you when you were sick, but it wasn't meant to be. We have to accept things the way they are, don't we? But it would've been nice."

"I'm impossible to live with," I said.

"You are who you are and you have a cock that's worth its weight in gold," said Brígida.

"Thank you," I said.

"I know what I'm talking about," said Brígida.

"So what else do you know?"

"About you?" Now Brígida was smiling, and this, I guessed, was her victory.

"About me, of course," I said as I swallowed the last of the tequila.

"That you're going to die young, Juan, and that you're going to do Rosario wrong."

DECEMBER 30

Today I went back to the Fonts' house. Today I did Rosario wrong.

I got up early, around seven, and went out to roam the streets downtown. Before I left I heard Rosario's voice saying: wait a second and I'll make you breakfast. I didn't answer. I closed the door quietly and left the tenement.

For a long time I walked as if I were in a foreign country, feeling choked and sick. When I got to the Zócalo my pores opened at last. I started to sweat freely, and my nausea vanished.

Then suddenly I was starving and I went into the first cafeteria I found open, a little place on Madero called Nueva Síbaris, where I ordered coffee and a ham sandwich.

To my great surprise, there was Pancho Rodríguez, sitting at the bar. His hair was freshly combed (it was still wet) and his eyes were red. He didn't look surprised to see me. I asked him what he was doing there, so far from home and so early in the morning.

"I was out whoring all night," he said, "to see whether I was finally ready to get the fuck over you-know-who."

I guessed that he meant Angélica, and as I took the first sips of coffee I thought about Angélica, María, my first visits to the Fonts' house. I felt happy. I felt hungry. Pancho, on the other hand, seemed listless. To distract him I told him that I'd left my aunt and uncle's place and that I was living with a woman in a tenement straight out of a 1940s movie, but Pancho wasn't in the right frame of mind to listen to me or anybody else.

After he'd smoked a few cigarettes, he said he felt like stretching his legs.

"Where do you want to go?" I asked, although deep down I already knew the answer, and if he didn't say what I expected to hear, I was ready to get it out of him by any means necessary.

"To Angélica's," said Pancho.

"That's the spirit," I said and I hurried to finish my breakfast.

Pancho went ahead and paid my bill (which was a first) and we left. A feeling of lightness settled in our legs. Suddenly Pancho didn't seem quite so trashed and I didn't feel so clueless about what to do with my life. Instead, the morning light returned us to ourselves, refreshed. Pancho was cheery and quick again, gliding along on words, and the window of a shoe store on Madero reflected back a mirror image of my inner vision of myself: someone tall, with pleasant features, neither gawky nor sickeningly shy, striding along followed by a smaller, stockier person in pursuit of his true love-or whatever else came his way!

Of course I had no idea then what the day had in store for us.

For the first half of the trip, Pancho was enthusiastic, friendly, and extroverted, but after that, as we got closer to Colonia Condesa, his mood changed and he seemed to succumb again to the old fears that his strange (or rather histrionic and enigmatic) relationship with Angélica awakened in him. The whole problem, he confided, gloomy again, had to do with the social divide between his family, who were lowly and working-class, and Angélica's, firmly ensconced as they were in Mexico City's petit bourgeoisie. To cheer him up, I argued that although this would surely make it harder to start a relationship, the chasm of class struggle narrowed considerably once the relationship was already under way. To which Pancho replied by asking what I meant by saying the relationship was already under way, a stupid question I didn't bother to answer. Instead I responded with another question: were he and Angélica really two average people, two typical, rigid representatives of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat?

"No, I guess not," said Pancho pensively as the taxi we'd caught at Reforma and Juárez headed at breakneck speed toward Calle Colima.

That's what I was trying to say, I told him, that since he and Angélica were poets, what difference did it make if one belonged to one social class and the other to another?

"Plenty, I'm telling you," said Pancho.

"Don't be mechanistic, man," I said, more and more irrationally happy.

Unexpectedly, the taxi driver backed me up: "If you've already gotten what you came for, there's no such thing as barriers. When love is good, nothing else matters."

"See?" I said.

"No, actually," said Pancho, "not really."

"You go at it with your girl and forget that communist crap," said the taxi driver.

"What do you mean communist crap?" said Pancho.

"You know, all that social class business."

"So according to you social classes don't exist," said Pancho.

The taxi driver, who had been watching us in the rearview mirror as he talked, turned around now, his right hand resting on the back of the passenger seat, his left firmly grasping the wheel. We're going to crash, I thought.

"For all intents and purposes, no. When it comes to love all Mexicans are equal. In the eyes of God too," said the taxi driver.

"What a load of bullshit!" said Pancho.

"If that's what you want to call it," replied the taxi driver.

With that, Pancho and the taxi driver started to argue about religion and politics, and meanwhile I stared out the window, watching the scenery (the storefronts of Juárez and Roma Norte) rolling monotonously past, and I also started to think about María and what separated me from her, which wasn't class but experience, and about Rosario and our tenement room and the wonderful nights I'd spent there with her, though I was prepared to give them up for a few seconds with María, a word from María, a smile from María. And I also started to think about my aunt and uncle and I even thought I saw them, walking arm in arm down one of the streets that we were passing, never turning to look at the taxi as it zigzagged perilously away down other streets, the two of them immersed in their solitude just as Pancho, the taxi driver, and I were immersed in ours. And then I realized that something had gone wrong in the last few days, something had gone wrong in my relationship with the new Mexican poets or with the new women in my life, but no matter how much I thought about it I couldn't figure out what the problem was, the abyss that opened up behind me if I looked over my shoulder. All the same, it didn't frighten me. It was an abyss without monsters, holding only darkness, silence, and emptiness, three extremes that caused me pain, a lesser pain, true, a flutter in the stomach, but a pain that sometimes felt like fear. And then, with my face glued to the window, we turned onto Calle Colima, and Pancho and the taxi driver stopped talking, or maybe only Pancho stopped, as if he'd given up trying to win his argument, and my silence and Pancho's silence clutched at my heart.

We got out a few feet past the Fonts' house.

"Something strange is going on here," said Pancho, as the taxi driver drove happily away, with a few choice words about our mothers.

At first glance the street looked normal, but I too noticed something different about the place I remembered so vividly. Across the street I saw two guys sitting in a yellow Camaro. They were staring at us.

Pancho rang the bell. For a few long seconds there wasn't any movement inside the house.

One of the occupants of the Camaro, the one sitting in the passenger seat, got out and propped his elbows on the roof of the car. Pancho watched him for a few seconds and then repeated, in a low voice, that something very strange was going on. The Camaro guy was scary. I remembered my first few times at the Fonts' house, standing at the door, gazing at the garden, which to my eyes seemed to spread before us full of secrets. That hadn't been long ago, and yet it felt like years.

It was Jorgito who came out to let us in.

When he got to the gate he made a sign to us that we didn't understand and he looked over toward where the Camaro was parked. He didn't return our greeting and when we were through the gate he shut and locked it again. The garden looked neglected. The house seemed different. Jorgito led us straight to the front door. I remember that Pancho looked at me inquiringly and as we walked he turned around and scanned the street.

"Move it, man," Jorgito told him.

Inside the house Quim Font and his wife were waiting for us.

"It was about time you showed up, García Madero," said Quim, giving me a big hug. I hadn't been expecting such a warm welcome. Mrs. Font was dressed in a dark green robe and slippers and it looked as if she'd just gotten up, although later I learned that she'd hardly slept the night before.

"What's going on here?" asked Pancho, looking at me.

"You mean what isn't going on," said Mrs. Font as she stroked Jorgito's hair.

After he hugged me, Quim went to the window and looked out surreptitiously.

"Nothing new to report, Dad," said Jorgito.

Immediately I thought about the men in the yellow Camaro and I began to form a vague idea of what was going on at the Fonts'.

"We're having breakfast, boys, would you like some coffee?" said Quim.

We followed him into the kitchen. There, sitting at the table, were Angélica, María-and Lupe! Pancho didn't even blink when he saw her, but I almost jumped out of my skin.

It's hard to remember what happened next, especially because María greeted me as if we'd never fought, as if we could pick things up again from where we'd left off. All I know is that I said hello to Angélica and Lupe in a friendly way and that María gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then we had coffee and Pancho asked what was going on. The explanations were various and heated and in the middle of it all Mrs. Font and Quim started to fight. According to Mrs. Font, this was the worst New Year's holiday she'd ever had. Think about the poor, Cristina, replied Quim. Mrs. Font started to cry and left the kitchen. Angélica went out after her, which prompted Pancho to make a move, though it came to nothing: he got up from his chair, followed Angélica to the door, and then sat down again. Meanwhile Quim and María, between the two of them, brought me up to date. Lupe's pimp had found her at the Media Luna. After a scuffle, the particulars of which I didn't understand, she and Quim had managed to escape from the hotel and make it to Calle Colima. This had been a few days ago. When Mrs. Font found out what was going on, she called the police, and it wasn't long before a couple of officers showed up in a patrol car. They said that if the Fonts wanted to make a formal complaint they would have to go to the station. When Quim told them that Alberto and the other guy were there, in front of the house, the officers went to talk to the pimp, and from the gate Jorgito could tell that they seemed more like old friends than anything else. Either the guy with Alberto was also a policeman, according to Lupe, or the police had been given a handout big enough to make them look the other way. That was when the siege of the Fonts' house formally began. The officers left. Mrs. Font called the police again. Different officers came, with the same result. A friend of Quim's, who talked to Quim on the phone, recommended that they wait out the siege as best they could until the holidays were over. Sometimes, according to Jorgito, who was the only one with the guts to spy on the intruders, another car would come, an Oldsmobile that parked behind the Camaro, and Alberto and his companion, after talking to the new besiegers for a while, would drive off noisily, even threateningly, making the car tires squeal and honking the horn. Six hours later they were back and the car that had replaced them would leave. There was no question that these comings and goings were wearing down the house's inhabitants. Mrs. Font refused to go out for fear that she'd be kidnapped. Quim, faced with these new developments, wouldn't go out either. He said it was out of responsibility to his family, although I think it was really out of fear that he would be beaten up. Only Angélica and María had crossed the threshold, once and separately, and the outcome was ugly. Angélica was heckled and María, who walked boldly right past the Camaro, was groped and knocked around. By the time we got there, the only person who dared to answer the door was Jorgito.

Once we'd been informed of the situation, Pancho's reaction was immediate.

He was going to go and beat the shit out of Alberto.

Quim and I tried to dissuade him, but there was nothing to be done. So after speaking to Angélica in private for a quarter of an hour, Pancho headed outside.

"Come with me, García Madero," he said, and like an idiot I followed him.

As we walked out, Pancho's determination to do battle cooled by several degrees. We opened the gate with the keys Jorgito had given us. Turning around to look back at the house, I thought I saw Quim watching us from the living room window and Mrs. Font from a second-floor window. This bites, said Pancho. I didn't know what to answer. Who asked him to open his mouth in the first place?

"It's all over for me with Angélica," said Pancho as he tried the keys one by one, unsuccessfully.

There were three people in the Camaro, not two as it had seemed before. Pancho strode right up to them and asked them what they wanted. I lingered several feet behind, the figure of the pimp hidden from me behind Pancho. I couldn't see him and he couldn't see me. But I heard his voice, resonant as a ranchera singer's, arrogant but not entirely unpleasant, nothing like what I would've expected, betraying not a hint of hesitation. The contrast with Pancho's voice was cruel. Pancho had begun to stutter and talk too fast, slipping too quickly toward insult and aggression.

At that moment, for the first time since everything that had happened that morning, I realized that these were dangerous people and I wanted to tell Pancho that we should turn around and go back into the house. But Pancho was already challenging Alberto.

"Get out of the car, man," he said.

Alberto laughed. He made a remark I didn't hear. The passenger-side door opened and it was the other guy who got out of the car. He was of average height, very dark, on the fat side.

"Get out of here, kid." It took me a minute to realize he was talking to me.

Then I saw that Pancho had taken a step back and Alberto was getting out of the car. What came next happened too fast. Alberto stepped up to Pancho (it looked like he was giving him a kiss) and Pancho collapsed.

"Leave him there, kid," said the dark guy from the other side, leaning on the roof of the car. I ignored him. I pulled Pancho up and we went back to the house. When we got to the door I turned around to look. The two of them were back in the yellow Camaro and it looked to me like they were laughing.

"You got it good, huh," said Jorgito, popping out of the bushes.

"The bastard had a gun," said Pancho. "If I'd fought back he would've shot me."

"That's what I thought," said Jorgito.

I hadn't seen any gun, but I kept quiet.

Together, Jorgito and I helped Pancho toward the house. When we were on the flagstone path leading to the porch, Pancho said no, that he wanted to go to María and Angélica's little house, so we went around through the garden. The rest of the day was mostly miserable.

Pancho shut himself up with Angélica in the little house. The maid came late and started cleaning, getting in everyone's way. Jorgito wanted to go visit some friends but his parents wouldn't let him. María, Lupe, and I played cards in the corner of the garden where María and I had first talked. For a moment I had the impression that we were repeating the motions from when we'd first met, when Pancho and Angélica would shut themselves in the little house and order us out, but now everything was different.

At lunchtime, at the kitchen table, Mrs. Font said she wanted a divorce. Quim laughed and shrugged as if to say that his wife had gone crazy. Pancho started to cry.

Then Jorgito turned on the television and he and Angélica sat down to watch a documentary on spiders. Mrs. Font served coffee to those of us who were still in the kitchen. Before the maid left, she announced that she wouldn't be coming the next day. Quim talked to her for a few seconds in the courtyard and gave her an envelope. María asked whether it was a plea for help. Please, sweetheart, said Quim, the phone line hasn't been cut yet. It was her end-of-year bonus.

I'm not sure exactly when Pancho left the house. I'm not sure exactly when I decided that I would spend the night there. All I know is that after dinner Quim took me aside and thanked me for the gesture.

"I expected no less of you, García Madero," he said.

"I'm at your service," I answered stupidly.

"Now let's forget all the silly stuff there's been between the two of us and concentrate on the defense of the castle," he said.

I didn't understand what he meant by silly stuff. I did understand what he meant about the castle. I decided to keep my mouth shut and nodded my head.

"It would be best if the girls slept in the house," said Quim, "for security reasons, you understand. In moments of grave danger it makes sense to gather the troops in a single spot."

We agreed on everything and that night Angélica slept in the guest room, Lupe in the living room, and María in Jorgito's room. I decided to sleep in the little house in the courtyard, maybe in the hope that María would pay me a visit, but after we'd said good night and gone our separate ways I lay there waiting in vain on María's bed, enveloped in María's smell, with an anthology of Sor Juana in my hands but unable to read, until I couldn't stand it anymore and I went out for a walk in the garden. The muted sound of a party came from one of the houses on Calle Guadalajara or Avenida Sonora. I went to the wall and looked over it: the yellow Camaro was still there, although I couldn't see anyone inside it. I went back to the house. There was a light in the living room window and when I listened at the door I heard soft voices that I couldn't identify. I was afraid to knock. Instead, I turned around and went in through the kitchen door. In the living room, sitting on the sofa, were María and Lupe. It smelled like marijuana. María was in a red nightgown, which I mistook for a dress at first, with a volcano, a river of lava, and a village on the verge of destruction embroidered in white on the bodice. Lupe hadn't put on her pajamas yet, if she even had pajamas, which I doubt, and she was in a miniskirt and black shirt, her hair a mess, which gave her a mysterious, attractive look. When they saw me, they were quiet. I would've liked to ask them what they were talking about, but instead I sat down beside them and told them that Alberto's car was still outside. They already knew.

"This is the strangest New Year's I've ever spent," I said.

María asked us whether we wanted coffee and then she got up and went into the kitchen. I followed her. As she was waiting for the water to boil I put my arms around her from behind and told her I wanted to sleep with her. She didn't answer. That must mean yes, I thought, and I kissed her neck and the nape of her neck. María's smell, a smell that had begun to seem strange to me again, aroused me so much that I started to shake. I instantly moved away from her. Leaning against the kitchen wall, I was afraid for a moment that I would lose my balance or pass out right there, and I had to make an effort to return to normal.

"You have a good heart, García Madero," she said as she left the kitchen carrying a tray with three cups of hot water, the Nescafé, and the sugar. I followed her like a sleepwalker. I would've liked to know what she meant by saying that I had a good heart, but that was the last she spoke to me.

I soon realized that my presence was unwelcome. María and Lupe had a lot to say to each other and none of it made any sense to me. For an instant it might seem as if they were talking about the weather and the next instant about Alberto, the evil pimp.

Back at the little house I felt so tired that I didn't even turn on the light.

I groped my way to María's bed, guided only by the dim light from the big house or the courtyard or the moon, who knows which, and I threw myself facedown without undressing and was asleep immediately.

I don't know what time it was or how long I slept that way. All I know is that it felt good and that when I woke up it was still dark and a woman was caressing me. It took me a while to realize that it wasn't María. For a few seconds I thought I was dreaming or that I was hopelessly lost in the tenement, with Rosario. I pulled whoever it was to me and searched for her face in the dark. It was Lupe and she was smiling like a spider.

DECEMBER 31

We had what you might call a family New Year's. All day long, old friends kept coming and going. Not many. A poet, two painters, an architect, Mrs. Font's younger sister, the father of the late Laura Damián.

The latter's visit was marked by extreme and mysterious behavior. Quim was in his pajamas and unshaven, sitting in the living room watching TV. I opened the door and Mr. Damián came in preceded by an enormous bouquet of red roses that he handed to me in a shy, clumsy gesture. As I took the flowers to the kitchen and looked for a vase or something to put them in, I heard him talking to Quim about the difficulties of day-to-day life. Then they talked about parties. They're not what they used to be, said Quim. They certainly aren't, said Laura Damián's father. You can say that again. Everything about the past was better, said Quim. We're getting old, said Laura Damián's father. Then Quim said something surprising: I don't know, he said, how you manage to keep on living. If I were you, I would've died a long time ago.

There was a prolonged silence, broken only by the distant voices of Mrs. Font and her daughters, who were putting up a piñata in the courtyard, and then Laura Damián's father burst into tears. My curiosity got the better of me and I came out of the kitchen, trying not to make a sound, an unnecessary precaution because the two men were intent on each other, Quim looking as if he'd just gotten up, his hair uncombed, circles under his bleary eyes, his pajamas wrinkled, his slippers dangling-he had dainty feet, as I could see, very different from my uncle's, for example-and Mr. Damián with his face bathed in tears, although the tears only made two furrows down his cheeks, two deep furrows that seemed to swallow up his whole face, his hands clasped, sitting in an armchair facing Quim. I want to see Angélica, he said. First wipe your nose, said Quim. Mr. Damián pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and rubbed his eyes and cheeks with it, then blew his nose. Life is hard, Quim, he said as he got up suddenly and headed for the bathroom like a sleepwalker. He didn't even glance at me as he went by.

Then I think I spent a while in the courtyard helping Mrs. Font get ready for the dinner party she was planning to host that evening, the last night of 1975. Each New Year's Eve I have a dinner party for friends, she said, it's a tradition by now, although this year I'd just as soon skip it; I'm not in a party mood, as you can imagine, but we have to be brave. I told her that Laura Damián's father was there. Alvarito comes every year, said Mrs. Font, he says I'm the best cook he knows. What will we have to eat tonight? I said.

"I have no idea, dear. I think I'll make some mole and then go to bed early. This isn't exactly a year for celebrations, is it?"

Mrs. Font looked at me and started to laugh. I think the woman isn't quite right in the head. Then the bell rang insistently and Mrs. Font, after standing there waiting for a few seconds, asked me to go see who it was. As I passed the living room I saw Quim and Laura Damián's father, each with a glass in his hand, sitting together on the sofa watching another TV show. The visitor at the door was one of the peasant poets. I think he was drunk. He asked me where Mrs. Font was and then he went straight out to the courtyard, where she stood amid her wreaths and little paper Mexican flags, avoiding the sad spectacle presented by Quim and Laura Damián's father. I went up to Jorgito's room and from there I saw the peasant poet clapping his hands to his head.

And yet there were many phone calls. First some woman named Lorena, an ex-visceral realist, called to invite María and Angélica to a New Year's Eve party. Then a poet from the Paz camp called. Then a dancer named Rodolfo called wanting to speak to María, but she refused to come to the phone and begged me to tell him that she wasn't home, which I did mechanically, taking no pleasure in it, as if I were beyond jealousy now (which if true would be amazing, since jealousy does no one any good). Then the head architect from Quim's studio called. Surprisingly, after talking to Quim, he wanted to speak to Angélica. When Quim asked me to call Angélica to the phone there were tears in his eyes and as Angélica talked, or rather listened, he told me that writing poetry was the most beautiful thing anyone could do on this godforsaken earth. Those were his exact words. Not wanting to contradict him, I agreed (I think I said "right on, Quim," a moronic reply any way you look at it). Then I spent a while at the girls' little house, talking to María and Lupe or rather listening to them talk as I wondered when and how the pimp's siege would end.

As for fucking Lupe last night, the whole thing's still shrouded in mystery, although I can honestly say it's been forever since I had such a great time. At one in the afternoon there was a semblance of lunch: first Jorgito, María, Lupe, and I ate, then at one-thirty Mrs. Font, Quim, Laura Damián's father, the peasant poet, and Angélica ate. As I was washing dishes I heard the peasant poet threatening to go out and confront Alberto, only to be warned against it by Mrs. Font, who said: Julio, don't be a fool. Then we all gathered for dessert in the living room.

That afternoon I showered.

My body was covered in bruises but I didn't know who'd given them to me, whether it was Rosario or Lupe. In any case it hadn't been María, and strangely enough that hurt, although the pain was far from unbearable, as it had been when I first met her. On my chest, just under my left nipple, I have a bruise the size of a plum. On my collarbone there are scratches like tiny comet trails. I discovered some marks on my shoulders too.

When I came out everyone was having coffee in the kitchen, some sitting and others standing. María had asked Lupe to tell the story of the whore Alberto almost choked to death with his cock. Every once in a while someone would interrupt Lupe's story and say my God, or what animals, and a female voice (Mrs. Font's or Angélica's) even said can you believe it, as Quim was saying to Laura Damián's father: you see the kind of person we have to deal with.

At four the peasant poet left, and soon afterward Mrs. Font's sister appeared. Dinner preparations shifted into high gear.

Between five and six there was a flurry of phone calls from people saying they couldn't make it to dinner and at six-thirty Mrs. Font said that she'd had enough, started to cry, and went upstairs to her bedroom, closing the door.

At seven Mrs. Font's sister, with María and Lupe's help, set the table and put the finishing touches on the dinner. But a few ingredients were missing and she went out to get them. Before she left Quim called her into his study for a few seconds. When she came out she had an envelope in her hand, with money in it, I guess, and from inside the study I heard Mr. Font tell her that she should put the envelope in her bag, because otherwise there was a risk it would be stolen by the occupants of the Camaro, a suggestion Mrs. Font's sister seemed to ignore at first, but as she opened the front door and left, she followed his advice. As an additional safety measure, Jorgito and I walked her to the gate. The Camaro was still there, but the occupants didn't even move when Mrs. Font's sister went by, heading toward Calle Cuernavaca.

At nine we sat down to dinner. Most of the guests had made their excuses and the only people who showed up were an older lady, a cousin of Quim's, I think; a tall, thin man who was introduced as an architect, or ex-architect, as he himself hastened to point out; and two painters who had no idea what was going on. Mrs. Font emerged from her room dressed to the nines and accompanied by her sister, who after returning had spent the final moments helping her dress, as if taking charge of dinner hadn't been enough. Lupe, who was becoming increasingly prickly as the new year approached, said that she had no right to have dinner with us and would eat in the kitchen, but María firmly refused to let her and finally (after an argument that to be honest I didn't understand) she ended up sitting at the table with everyone else.

Dinner got off to an unusual start.

Quim rose and said that he wanted to give a toast. I guessed that it would be a toast to his wife, who under the circumstances had demonstrated incredible fortitude, but it was a toast to me! He spoke of my youth and my poems, he recalled my friendship with his daughters (when he said this he stared at Laura Damián's father, who nodded) and my friendship with him, our conversations, our unexpected encounters on the streets of Mexico City, and bringing his speech to a close-it was actually short but to me it seemed to go on forever-he asked me, now addressing me directly, not to judge him too harshly when I grew up and became a responsible adult citizen. When he stopped talking, I was red with embarrassment. María, Angélica, and Lupe clapped. The clueless painters clapped too. Jorgito crawled under the table and no one seemed to notice. When I snuck a glance at Mrs. Font, she looked as mortified as I was.

Despite this lively beginning, the New Year's Eve dinner was sad and silent. Mrs. Font and her sister busied themselves with serving; María hardly touched her food; Angélica sank into a silence more languid than sullen; Quim and Laura Damián's father generally kept to themselves, though they paid some attention to the architect, who spent the evening gently scolding Quim; the two painters only talked to each other and every once in a while to Laura Damián's father (it seemed he also collected art); and María and Lupe, who at the beginning of dinner had seemed the most inclined to have a good time, got up to help serve and finally disappeared into the kitchen. Sic transit gloria mundi, Quim said to me from the other end of the table.

Then someone rang the doorbell and we all jumped. María and Lupe looked in from the kitchen.

"Someone get the door," said Quim, but no one moved.

I was the one to get up.

The garden was dark and through the gate I could see two figures. I thought it must be Alberto and his policeman friend. I felt an irrational desire to fight and I headed purposefully toward them. When I got a little closer, however, I realized that it was Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. They didn't say why they'd come. They weren't surprised to see me. I remember thinking: we're saved!

There was more than enough food, and Ulises and Arturo were seated at the table and Mrs. Font served them dinner while the rest of us had dessert or talked. When they were done eating, Quim took them into his study. Laura Damián's father soon followed.

A little while later Quim looked out the half-open door and called for Lupe. Those of us in the living room looked as if we were at a funeral. María asked me to come with her to the courtyard. She talked to me for what seemed like a long time but couldn't have been more than five minutes. This is a trap, she said. Then the two of us went into her father's study.

Surprisingly, Álvaro Damián had taken charge. He was sitting in Quim's chair (Quim was standing in a corner) and signing several checks to the bearer. Belano and Lima were smiling. Lupe seemed worried but resigned. María asked Laura Damián's father what was going on. Laura Damián's father looked up from his checkbook and said that the Lupe problem had to be solved as quickly as possible.

"I'm going north, mana," said Lupe.

"What?" said María.

"Here, with these guys, in your dad's car."

It didn't take me long to figure out that Quim and Laura Damián's father had convinced my friends to take Lupe with them and go wherever they wanted, thus lifting the siege of the house.

What surprised me most was that Quim was letting them take the Impala. That was something I certainly hadn't expected.

When we left the room, Lupe and María went to pack. I followed them. Lupe's suitcase was almost empty because when she fled the hotel she'd left most of her clothes behind.

After the countdown to midnight on TV we all hugged: María, Angélica, Jorgito, Quim, Mrs. Font, her sister, Laura Damián's father, the architect, the painters, Quim's cousin, Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, Lupe, and I.

There came a moment when none of us knew whom we were hugging anymore or whether we'd hugged the same person more than once.

Until ten it had been possible to see the shapes of Alberto and his sidekicks through the gate. By eleven they weren't there anymore and Jorgito was brave enough to go out into the garden, look over the wall, and scan the whole street. They were gone. At twelve-fifteen we all made our way stealthily to the garage and the goodbyes began. I hugged Belano and Lima and asked them what would happen to visceral realism. They didn't answer me. I hugged Lupe and told her to take care of herself. In return I got a kiss on the cheek. Quim's car was a white Ford Impala, the latest model, and Quim and his wife wanted to know who the driver would be, as if at the last minute they were having second thoughts.

"Me," said Ulises Lima.

As Quim explained some of the finer points of the car to Ulises, Jorgito said that we should hurry up because Lupe's pimp had just come back. For a few seconds everyone started talking in normal voices and Mrs. Font said: the shame of it all, to be reduced to this. Then I hurried off to the Fonts' little house, got my books, and came back. The car's engine was already running and everyone looked frozen in place.

I saw Arturo and Ulises in the front seats and Lupe in back.

"Someone will have to go open the gate," said Quim.

I offered to do it.

I was on the sidewalk when I saw the lights of the Camaro and the lights of the Impala go on. It looked like a science fiction movie. As one car left the house, the other approached, as if the two were magnetically attracted to each other, or drawn together by fate, which the Greeks would say is the same thing.

I heard voices. People were calling my name. Quim's car passed me. I saw the shape of Alberto getting out of the Camaro and the next moment he was alongside the car my friends were in. His friends, still sitting in the Camaro, yelled at him to break one of the Impala's windows. Why doesn't Ulises hit the gas? I thought. Lupe's pimp started to kick the doors. I saw María coming through the garden toward me. I saw the faces of the thugs inside the Camaro. One of them was smoking a cigar. I saw Ulises's face and his hands, which were moving on the dashboard of Quim's car. I saw Belano's face looking impassively at the pimp, as if none of this had anything to do with him. I saw Lupe, who was covering her face in the backseat. I thought that the window glass couldn't withstand another kick and the next moment I was up next to Alberto. Then I saw that Alberto was swaying. He smelled of alcohol. They'd been celebrating the new year too, of course. I saw my right fist (the only one I had free since my books were in my other hand) hurtling into the pimp's body and this time I saw him fall. I heard my name being called from the house and I didn't turn around. I kicked the body at my feet and I saw the Impala, which was moving at last. I saw the two thugs get out of the Camaro and I saw them coming toward me. I saw that Lupe was looking at me from inside the car and that she was opening the door. I realized that I'd always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close the door Ulises stepped on the gas. I heard a shot or something that sounded like a shot. They're shooting at us, the bastards, said Lupe. I turned around and through the back window I saw a shadow in the middle of the street. All the sadness of the world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impala's window. It's firecrackers, I heard Belano say as our car leaped forward and left behind the Fonts' house, the thugs' Camaro, Calle Colima, and in less than two seconds we were on Avenida Oaxaca, heading north out of the city.