The next morning we returned to Parque Hundido. I'd had a bad night, unable to sleep, such a nervous wreck that even reading Amado Nervo couldn't soothe me (incidentally, I would never admit to Don Octavio that I'd been reading Amado Nervo, I'd mention Don Carlos Pellicer or Don José Gorostiza, and of course I have read them, but you tell me what point there is reading Pellicer or Gorostiza when you're trying to relax, or with luck even fall asleep, when really it's better not to read anything at all, even Amado Nervo, it's better to watch television, the stupider the show, the better), and I had huge circles under my eyes that makeup couldn't hide and even my voice was a little hoarse, as if the night before I'd smoked a pack of cigarettes or had too much to drink. But Don Octavio didn't notice a thing and he got in the Volkswagen and we left for Parque Hundido, without speaking a word, as if we'd been doing it all our lives, which was exactly one of those things that drove me wild, that ability of human beings to adapt to anything, instantly. In other words: if I stopped and thought calmly, which was the proper thing to do, and said to myself that we'd only been to Parque Hundido twice, and this was the third time, well, I could hardly believe it, because it really did seem as if we'd been there many times, and if I admitted that we'd only been there twice, then it was worse, because it made me want to scream or drive my Volkswagen into a wall, so I had to get control of myself and concentrate on the steering wheel and not think about Parque Hundido or the stranger who visited it when we did. In short, not only was I haggard that morning, with circles under my eyes, I was irrationally upset. And yet what happened that morning was very different from what I'd expected.
We got to Parque Hundido. That much is clear. We walked into the park and sat on the same bench as always, under the shelter of a big, leafy tree, although I suppose it was as sick as all the trees in Mexico City. And then, instead of leaving me alone on the bench as he had before, Don Octavio asked me whether I'd completed the task he'd given me yesterday, and I said yes, Don Octavio, I made a list of lots of names, and he smiled and asked whether I'd memorized the names and I looked at him as if to ask whether he was serious and took the list out of my bag and showed it to him and he said: Clarita, find out who that boy is. That was all he said. And I got up like an idiot and went to wait for the stranger, and to pass the time I started to walk until I realized that I was following the same path Don Octavio had taken on the two previous days and then I stopped walking, not daring to look at him, my gaze fixed on the spot where the stranger whose identity I was supposed to discover should appear. And the stranger appeared, at the same time as he had twice before, and he started to walk. And then, not wanting to prolong matters any further, I went up to him and asked him who he was and he said I'm Ulises Lima, the visceral realist poet, none other than the second-to-last visceral realist poet left in Mexico, and to be honest, what can I say, his name didn't ring any bells, although the night before, on Don Octavio's orders, I'd gone through the indexes of more than ten anthologies of recent and not so recent poetry, among them the famous Zarco anthology that catalogs more than five hundred young poets. But his name didn't ring any bells. And then I said: do you know who that gentleman is sitting over there? And he said: yes, I know. And I said (I had to be sure): who is he? And he said: it's Octavio Paz. And I said: do you want to come sit with him for a while? And he shrugged his shoulders or made a similar gesture that I interpreted as a yes and both of us went walking toward the bench from which Don Octavio was following our every move with great interest. When I reached him I thought that it wouldn't hurt to make a formal introduction, so I said: Don Octavio Paz, the visceral realist poet Ulises Lima. And then Don Octavio, as he motioned for Lima to take a seat, said: visceral realist, visceral realist (as if the name was familiar to him), wasn't that Cesárea Tinajero's circle? And Lima sat down beside Don Octavio and sighed or made a strange noise with his lungs and said yes, that was what Cesárea Tinajero's circle was called. For a minute or so they were silent, looking at each other. An excruciating minute, to be honest. In the distance, past some bushes, I saw two bums. I think I got a little nervous, which foolishly led me to ask Don Octavio what the group was and whether he had known them. I might just as well have remarked on the weather. And then Don Octavio looked at me with those pretty eyes of his and said Clarita, back in the days of the visceral realists I would hardly have been ten years old, this was around 1924, wasn't it? he said, addressing Lima. And Lima said yes, more or less, the 1920s, but he said it with such sadness in his voice, with such… emotion, or feeling, that I thought it was the saddest voice I would ever hear. I think I even felt ill. Don Octavio's eyes and the stranger's voice and the morning and Parque Hundido, such a seedy place, isn't it? so neglected, wounded me in the depths of my being, just how, I couldn't say. So I left them to talk in peace and moved several feet away, to the nearest bench, with the excuse that I had to look over the next day's schedule, and I brought along the list I'd made of the names of Mexican poets from recent generations and I went through it from beginning to end, and I can promise you that Ulises Lima was nowhere on it. How long did they talk? Not long. And yet from where I was sitting it was clear that it was a leisurely, calm, polite conversation. Then the poet Ulises Lima got up, shook Don Octavio's hand, and left. I watched him walk off toward one of the park exits. The bums I had seen in the shrubbery, three of them now, were moving toward us. Let's go, Clarita, I heard Don Octavio say.