guayaberas. And one window farther down the street their female companions wearing black silk bras and lilac panties and garter belts. Multilated legs of crystalline plastic sheathed in nylons. Now he was before the window of a sweets shop. Mounds of chocolates. Domes of gumdrops. Pyramids of crystallized fruit. Boxes of pineapple compote. His saliva began to flow and his gastric juices redoubled their damned attack and he felt the sharp pain that his doctors had informed him was only a reflex and did not come from the site of the ulceration, the raw mouth of his stomach, but was some echo from the vicinity of his liver, as if the ulceration had dispatched a flaming arrow that he would have liked to blunt and damp out with a protective coating of sugar, except that he knew that if he ate a piece of candy the relief would last only a few minutes, the devouring sulfurous acids would be satiated for a little but only at the expense of a nervous indigestion from his intestines, that spasm which had already begun would run its course and end by refusing passage to the innocent candy but on the contrary would assault it viciously, agitate it violently, bombard it from all sides with the gases that would swell his belly tight and assure either prolonged obstruction or equally prolonged diarrhea; and the first, because laxatives irritated him even more than his own bitter secretions, would have to be resolved by the indignity of a glycerine suppository, one of those they sell in striated transparent bottles with black caps, or by the worse indignity of an enema, at which he would have to ask his wife to assist and hold the can high while he would lie naked on the bed, partially covered by a sheet, with his legs raised and open, and with his own hand take the tube and search for his tense, apprehensive anus and insert the damn thing, feeling that that black nozzle was entering him in a most equivocal way, that it was exceeding its legitimate function and reaming him as high as his gullet, where he would be able to taste the warm liquid that would flow toward the center of his compacted guts and make them hurt and then flow out again carrying with it the intestinal flora he needed to digest anything, so that he would have to remind his wife to buy some yoghurt — today they have it in strawberry flavor — and put it in the icebox; yes, either a miserable obstruction or a diarrhea that at first he would blame on one of those infections so common in Mexico, as if he did not know that since childhood he had been well protected by his own amoebae against those outside him, by his own antibodies against the swarming microbes that come in the whitewash milk, the trichinotic meat, the sewage-contaminated drinking water; and he would have to take those Entero-Vioform tablets which always, curiously, calmed his nerves but had no effect whatsoever on his bowels. For a moment longer he looked in at the candies and the swarm of black flies hovering and crawling over them. Then he walked on, his hands cold with sweat. Several doors down the street he came to a small fruit-juice bar and he went in and ordered a tamarind water and watched the fat proprietor of the bar thrust a spoon into an aluminum container and then empty it into an opaque blue glass and add water and stir. He held the glass near his nostrils. He asked for another and the fat proprietor mixed it and handed it to him and he drank again and paid a peso, which the proprietor took wordlessly and stuck in his shirt pocket. He walked out. Factory whistles were blowing. He had not the faintest notion what time they indicated, nor did he want to look at his watch. He walked very slowly, holding to the left side of the sidewalk, against traffic, jostling elbows and shoulders and taking advantage of these encounters to beg pardon, examine faces, touch hands, perhaps force those he bumped against to become aware of him. His fingers brushed the cropped hair of a small boy who was tossing three chipped marbles from palm to palm, the docile shoulders of a girl with a permanent and dark glasses and a cheap silk blouse that to the touch was what the sound of a blade scraping across a metal plate is to the hearing. He jostled them, elbowed them, bumped them like a blind man, but all the while he was sharply alert to their responses, gestures, expressions, their eyes, questioning, irritated, black, unprotected, accusing, wary, their full or linear mouths clamped or half open to suck in air, breathe it out, run the tongue across the lower lip. Presently he stopped and looked up and down the street and frowned. Where was he? He hadn’t the least idea. He was lost. Yes, he was lost: he was a child again and had left the house to follow his mother, to try to learn where it was she disappeared to every afternoon, and had fallen too far behind her and now was lost because he knew only the familiar coordinates and the customary routes, from home on Calzada del Niño Perdido to the candy store at the corner or to the Parque de Ajusco or to the school of the Marist Fathers on Morelos. Lost he was all right, and they, those passing him as he stood on the sidewalk, did not know or care, he mattered not at all to any of them, had not the slightest importance except that standing there, motionless and puzzled, he was something of an obstacle, like a misplaced lamppost, perhaps, or an errant mail pillar that they had to avoid a little, dodge, walk around. They did not know him or want to know him. They could not feel the burning juices in his belly, the irregular beating of his heart, the dead heaviness of his legs, the cold and sticky sweat in his palms, the protesting twitch of his nervous system as he put his fingers to his pack of cigarettes. They knew nothing about him, nothing at all, neither who he was nor what he was nor why he was, nothing except the accidental and transient datum he happened to share with them at the moment but did not know himself, where he was. To hell with them. He would move out of their scurrying way, turn his back on the street and touch his wet palms to a wall of old carved stone, squint his eyes and shut off the dust-dissolved morning sun. He would lean against the wall for a few seconds and then pass through a doorway, partially blocked by fallen stone, and carefully make his way along a dark gallery that led to a wide and empty patio with a waterless fountain flowing over with yellowed newspapers and forgotten parcels wrappings. He sat on the edge of the fountain and immediately smelled an overwhelming stench. He stretched out his hand and tugged on the tail of the fly-covered, worm-infested cadaver of a yellow dog, its hide crusted brown and black with dried blood, its mouth open. A wave of nausea swept up from his stomach and he jerked his hand away and the dog fell soundlessly back among its newspapers and the worms in the rotting flesh wriggled and squirmed and then made themselves at home again. He stood and took out a Stelabid and tried to swallow it with saliva but the capsule stuck in his throat and choked him and he began to cough, cough until he had to pound the back of his neck with his fist. When he recovered his breath, he crossed his arms on his chest and looked about. It was one of the very old, very early colonial palaces, constructed by Indian masons under the direction of Spanish architects. Probably they had had to flatten a still earlier structure to create the site, one of their stone temples, perhaps; had broken it up and dumped its heavy fragments into the lake and then had brought boatloads and cartloads of the new stone, rose-colored volcanic tezontle, and had laid new foundations and raised the great thick walls and in the patio had built an ornate portal that now was almost invisible behind the faded signs of the shops and businesses that used to be housed here, a portal of two sinuous ductile stone columns resting on the large claws of some jungle animal, a tiger or a lion, and rising wound about with vines and clustered with grapes to join at the top, where the vines twined and interlaced in a mazy network that supported the crown, the black stone cross. Far above, the small panes of the skylight patio roof and drains of lead that during the rainy season, not now, would empty gushing through the mouths of the cast gargoyles. The dry fountain in the center and in the center of the fountain the two tritons that once, painted gold, had spouted water but that now were scaling, greenish, dry, their open mouths blocked with dust and cobwebs. On either side, great ornate stone doors gave entrance to the old great chambers which long since had been subdivided, partitioned into many small rooms walled off from each other and reached from the abandoned patio by small doors of splintered wood and broken glass. He lifted his head and looked again at the intricate web of vines woven over the high portal and he could think only of the even more intricate web of small and great vessels and nerves that threaded through his own flesh. The Stelabid already was making him a little dizzy, a little drowsy, but it had not freed him from the pain near his liver. Slowly he walked out. He took his cigarettes from his pocket and put one of them between his lips, wetting the paper and sucking in air, holding the box of matches — Talismans: Imperial Quality, a golden scorpion on a red ground and unrolled papyrus with the admonition,