"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.